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SUN HUNTING 





President Harding, an oeeasional sun-hunter, slices one into tlie palmettos 
on one of Miami Beach's three links. 



SUN HUNTING 

Adventures and Observations among the Native 

and Migratory Tribes of Florida, including the 

Stoical Time-Killers of Palm Beach, the 

Gentle and Gregarious Tin-Canners 

of the Remote Interior, and the 

Vivacious and Semi-Violent 

Peoples of Miami and 

Its PurKeus 



By j^ 
Kenneth L. Roberts 

Author of Why Europe Leaves Home 



INDIANAPOLIS 

.THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



F3l(o 



n(.+ 



Copyright, 1922 
By The Curtis Publishing Company 

Copyright, 1922 
By The Bobbs-Merrill Company 



Printed in the United States of America, 



PRESS OF 

BRAUNWORTH & CO. 

BOOK MANUFACTURERS 

BROOKLYN, N. Y. 



NOV 2': ... 
©r.ii ('.92157 



To 

Juan Ponce De Leon 

who found in 1513 

That Florida wasn't all it was 

Cracked Up to be 
BUT who Liked it Well Enough 

TO Go Back 

This Book is Appreciatively 

Dedicated 



CONTENTS 

BOOK ONE 

The Time-Killers 



Chapter Page 

I Of time-killing in the French and English 
manner — and of ancient and modern Ameri- 
can time-slaughterers 3 

II Of the passage from winter to summer in one 
day's time — and of the habitat of some rare 
specimens 8 

III Of the peculiar differences between two sides 

of a lake — of money odors — and of the 
questers after Charley Schwab .... 13 

IV Of the apotheosis of the bicycle — of the uses of 

wheel-chairs — and of the mental activities 
of chair-chauffeurs 18 

V Of the telegram-expecters — of the date-guessers 

— and of the statistic weevils 22 

VI Of the changing of clothes — of the way they 
wear 'em — and of the females of the dress- 
ferret species 26 

VII Of the fascinations of the beach — of the sand- 
hounds from Odessa and elsewhere — and of 
prudes and stylish stouts 30 

VIII Of the Three Day Suckers — of true smartness 

— and of the Buckwheats and the dead line 36 

IX Of the smartest thing in Palm Beach — of large 

amounts of money — and of the Old Guard 41 

X Of those who wish to crash into society — and of 
those who furnish the palpitating society 
items 47 



CONTENTS— Continued 

Chapter Page 

XI Of the Alibi Window— of the trick flasks and 
canes — of drinkers frail and fat — and of one 
conception of simplicity 50 

XII Of nuts in the Coconut Grove — of Bradley's 
— of the relaxation and amusement of the 
Beach Club- fellows — ^and of gambling in 
general 55 

XIII Of the divergences between Bradley's and 
Monte Carlo — of the idiosyncrasies of the 
little white pill — of the oddities of fat play- 
ers — of time-killing pastimes — and of the wis- 
dom of Dionysius the Elder 62 



BOOK TWO 

The Tin-Canners 

I Of January in the North — of the winter pas- 
times of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Walnut — 
and of a penetrating chill 71 

II Of a pronounced change of scene — of a daring 
game of chance amid tropical scents — ^and 
of the gloating of Charles Walnut and Her- 
man Blister 75 

III Of migrants and migrations — of the true sun- 

hunter and his desires — and of his uniform, 
and his fluent assortment of equipment . . 79 

IV Of the Tin-Can Tourists of the World— of im- 

migrants and other unsupervised and unso- 
licited visitors, national and local — of cheap 
skates — and of the reason why tin-canners do 
not abound in Palm Beach 87 

V Of portable bungalows — of the rheumatic dairy- 
man — of the little ole truck — of simple 
pleasures and low expenditures .... 96 

VI Of Mrs. Jarley, the original tin-canner — of the 
two schools of tin-can thought — of the hard- 
boiled bachelor with the condensed outfit 
— and of folk who ride on the backs of their 
necks 103 



CONTENTS— Co/j^mK^J 

Chapter Page 

VII Of the migrant from Marion — of his fears — of 
land at a nickel an acre — of sand fleas and 
sand spurs — of loneliness and honeymooners 
— and of the doctor who was run to death no 

VIII Of the marvelous sitting ability of the tin- 
canners — of the parks in which they sit — of 
the horseshoe bugs and the checker and 
domino beetles — of the delicate movements 
of a celebrated horseshoe tosser — ^and of the 
International Horseshoe Qub .... 115 

BOOK THREE 
Tropical Growth 

I Of the enthusiasm of all growing things in 
Florida — of paw-paws and prospectuses and 
perfect thirty-fours— of fiends in human 
shape — and of the watchfulness of the na- 
tives for insults 125 

II Of hotel rates — of mosquitoes — and of the 
outcry against the Shipping Board for daring 
to mention Europe » 130 

III Of palm trees— of varieties of fish — and of fruit 

and liars and Baron Munchausen . . . 134 

IV Of Miami and of tropical growth— of the grow- 

ing of a shingle into a bungalow — of the 
population of Miami in 1980— and of the 
pronunciation of Miami 137 

V Of real-estate dealers— of the large handsome 
salesmen— of noisy auctiofis — of absolute 
and unabsolute auctions — and of prices for 
every pocketbook 143 

VI Of subdivisions, wise and otherwise— of land- 
scape atrocities — of small farms and farmers 
— and of fascinating strawberry and tomato 
statistics 150 

VII Of the suspicious stories concerning the mango 
—of the pet mango of the Miamians— and 
of its superiority to otl^er things .... 156 



COIJTENTS— Concluded 

Chapter Page 

VIII Of the Everglades and of the two seasons ob- 
taining in that damp locality — and of grass, 
fancy and otherwise l6l 

IX Of the old Miami and the new Miami — of dif- 
ferences between Miami Beach and Palm 
Beach — of the scenic possibilities in floating 
coconuts and the activities of John S. 
Collins 165 

X Of the arrival of Carl Fisher in Miami — of 
Fisher's feverish imagination and violent 
dreams — of the despair of Fisher's friends 
— and of the evolution of a jungle . . . 172 

XI Of expensive expenses and heated ice-rinks — 
of lily on lily that o'erlace the sea — and of 
the boneheadedness of most of the human 
race 178 

XII Of one-piece and two-fifths-piece bathing suits — 
of the Honorable William Jennings Bryan 
and his activities — of bootleggers — of the 
sanctimonious Haig and Haig boys — and of 
rum in general 183 

XIII Of Florida fishing — of the tigerish barracuda 
and the surprised-looking dolphin — of the 
unconventional habits of the whip-ray and 
the varying estimates of Cap'n Charley 
Thompson — and of the conservative raving 
of the Miami prospectuses 191 



BOOK ONE 

THE TIME-KILLERS 



SUN HUNTING 

CHAPTER I 

OF TIME-KILLING IN THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH 

MANNER AND OF ANCIENT AND MODERN 

AMERICAN TIME-SLAUGHTERERS 

People who have any time to kill are 
usually filled with a deep and intense desire 
to kill it in some spot far removed from their 
usual haunts. 

This desire is not so much due to their 
wish to avoid making a mess around the 
house as it is to the peculiar mental obses- 
sion known to the French as "'homesickness 
:''or elsewhere." French society has been 
afflicted for years with a passionate desire 
to be somewhere that it isn't. A Parisian 
with time to kill aims to move up to the clear 
cold air of the mountains where he can kill 

3 



4 SUN HUNTING 

lots of it. When he gets to the mountains, 
it suddenly occurs to him that possibly he 
might find a little more time to kill at the 
seashore, where the eye may roam at will 
across the boundless and unobstructed 
waves. So he moves to the seashore and at 
once begins to suspect that in Paris one can 
find more weapons with which to cause 
time to die a lingering and horrible death. 
So he moves back to Paris, where he once 
more hunts restlessly for other means to kill 
time. He has the homesickness for else- 
where. 

The English, too, have it to a marked 
degree. All Englishmen who have incomes 
larger than two hundred guineas a year own 
tea baskets with which they go off to dis- 
tant heaths or popular woods on bank holi- 
days and week-ends for the purpose of 
killing time and burying it with the appro- 
priate funeral exercises. They are all the 
time running up to the moors for a bit of 
rough shooting, or over to Switzerland for 



THE TIME-KILLERS 5 

a bit of sheeing, or off to a country-house 
for a bit of punting or Scotch-drinking, or 
down to Brighton for a week-end. An Eng- 
lish week-end is sadly misnamed, inasmuch 
as it usually consists of Friday, Saturday, 
Sunday and Monday, with a bit of Thurs- 
day and Tuesday thrown in for good 
measure. 

Of late years, the American people have 
been growing increasingly proficient at time- 
killing. Forty years ago, the average 
American, confronted with a little extra 
time, didn't know what to do with it. Us- 
ually he took it into the front parlor and sat 
around on haircloth furniture with it, and 
became so sick of it that he never wanted to 
see its face again. If he felt within him 
the primitive urge to take it somewhere and 
kill It, he hesitated to do so because the 
roads were bad, automobiles hadn't been 
invented, and the South was only regarded 
as the place where the Civil War started. 
Distances were great. Few people cared to 



6 SUN HUNTING 

travel, because it was generally believed that 
a person who absented himself from busi- 
ness more than one working day out of 
every five years was a loose, dangerous and 
depraved character. One of the most excit- 
ing things to do forty years ago was to put 
on a striped flannel coat and play croquet 
on the front lawn. 

To-day, however, America has caught the 
germs of ''homesickness for elsewhere" 
from the French and English. Florida has 
been reclaimed from the swamps and the 
Indians, the small automobile has been put 
within the means of stevedores, cooks, 
second-story workers and moderately suc- 
cessful story-writers, and golf trousers may 
be worn in western towns without causing 
the wearer to be shot. A road is cursed 
fluently by an automobilist if it is bad 
enough to get his wheel-spokes muddy. The 
business man who can't knock off work for 
two or three months a year is regarded 
pityingly as being either a back number. 



THE TIME-KILLERS 7 

feeble-minded, or a poor man. All of these 
things being so, Americans with time to kill 
can take it farther from home and kill it with 
more thoroughness than any other people on 
earth. They go into their time-killing with 
more energy than do Europeans. The 
European is usually content to do his time- 
killing within three hundred miles of home. 
The American is never content unless he can 
travel from fifteen hundred to three thou- 
sand miles, and wind up with an orgy of 
time-killing that would make a professional 
executioner look by comparison like the 
president of a Dorcas society. 



CHAPTER II 

OF THE PASSAGE FROM WINTER TO SUMMER IN ONE 

day's TIME — AND OF THE HABITAT OF SOME 

RARE SPECIMENS 

It is in Florida that the American time- 
killer may be found in all his glory ; and the 
largest, most perfect and most brilliantly 
colored specimens are to be found at Palm 
Beach. It is at Palm Beach that one finds 
the very rare variety measuring twenty 
minutes from tip to tip. 

One can best understand why it is that 
winter-bound northerners select Florida as 
the scene of their time-killing by following 
in their footsteps and boarding a Florida- 
bound night train in a northern city during 
a heavy blizzard. 

Early the next morning, when one disen- 
tangles the bedclothes from his neck and 
elevates the trick shade of the sleeping-car 
window after the usual severe struggle, one 
finds that the snow has nearly disappeared. 
8 



THE TIME-KILLERS 9 

The eye is wearied by the flat plains of 
North Carolina, relieved only by negro shan- 
ties and scrub pines. By afternoon North 
Carolina has merged into South Carolina. 
The flatness continues with unbounded en- 
thusiasm; but there is no snow and the air 
is milder. The pines are marked with pecu- 
liar herring-bone gashes, whence flows 
turpentine, the painter's delight. Piney 
odors, vaguely reminiscent of tar soap, 
sheep dip and cold-remedies, float through 
the half-opened windows. Later that eve- 
ning, as one returns to the dining-car to 
recover the hat which one has forgotten in 
the excitement of tipping the waiter, one 
hears frequent shrill frog-choruses from 
the pools beside the tracks. By midnight 
one is ringing for the porter to tear himself 
from his slumbers among the shoes in the 
smoking compartment and start the electric 
fans. One's rest is troubled by the heat and 
the increasing shrillness of the frog-choruses. 
On the second morning the rising sun dis- 



lo SUN HUNTING 

closes a limitless expanse of flatness, dotted 
with occasional palm trees and covered 
with a scrubby growth of near-palms or 
palmettos. The sun is hot and red. A 
black ribbon of asphalt road parallels the 
railroad; and at intervals along it appear 
flocks of flivvers nesting drowsily among 
the palms and the tin-can tourists. There 
is plenty of glaring white sand, and plenty 
of stagnant water. The air is full of swal- 
lows, and an occasional pelican flops lan- 
guidly alongside the train, gazing pessimis- 
tically at the passengers. 

The traveler perspires lightly and marvels 
at the thought that it was only night before 
last when he slipped on a piece of ice and 
got half a peck of snow down the back of 
his neck. He remembers that it is a great 
and glorious country — a fact which his con- 
templation of the antics of Congress had 
caused him to forget. 

Occasionally the train flashes past little 
towns sitting hotly in the sun and sand 



THE TIME-KILLERS ii 

among a few orange and grapefruit trees. 
This is Florida, and the land looks as though 
it were worth about a nickel an acre — just 
as it has always looked until some one devel- 
ops it and begins to sell off corner lots at a 
paltry five thousand dollars apiece. 

Around breakfast time — a mere thirty- 
six hours since the train emerged from its 
northern blizzard and snow-drifts — the 
train crosses a shimmering strip of blue 
water and comes to rest beside a hotel that 
seems, at first glance, to be at least ten miles 
long. It stretches off so far into the dis- 
tance that people up at the other end appear 
to be hull-down. In reality it is only about 
half a mile long, and only about five hun- 
dred times larger than the Mousam House 
at Kennebunk, Maine. 

On the station platform are women in 
satin skirts, gauzy waists and diamond 
bracelets. Young men in white trousers 
dash up and down the platform on bicycles. 
The air is soft and balmy. Palm trees 



12 SUN HUNTING 

stretch off into the distance in every direc- 
tion. Wheel-chairs, propelled by dignified- 
looking negroes who sit on bicycle-seats di- 
rectly behind the chairs and pedal vigorously, 
move hither and yon in a stately manner. 
Through the palm trees one catches glimpses 
of white yachts riding at anchor on blue water. 

A wheel-chair stops at the edge of the 
station platform. In it are seated a digni- 
fied gentleman in white flannels, and a gra- 
cious lady in a satin skirt and a sweater 
covered with neat lightning effects in red, 
green and orange zigzags. One wonders 
whether this can be J. Pierpont Morgan or 
Charley Schwab. Then one hears the gra- 
cious lady whisper excitedly to the dignified 
gentleman: "Do you suppose that's Char- 
ley Schwab or J. Pierpont Morgan over 
there?" and hears the dignified gentleman 
reply in a hoarse undertone: "Shut up, or 
they'll think we're boobs !" 

This is Palm Beach, the very center of 
the winter time-killing industry. 



CHAPTER III 

OF THE PECULIAR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TWO 

SIDES OF A LAKE OF MONEY ODORS — AND 

OF THE QUESTERS AFTER CHARLEY SCHWAB 

Palm Beach is a long narrow strip of 
land which is separated from the mainland by 
a long narrow body of water known as Lake 
Worth, and by a sudden increase in living 
expenses. On the mainland side of Lake 
Worth is the rising young city of West 
Palm Beach, where one is not afraid — as he 
usually is in Palm Beach — to offer a store- 
keeper or a newsboy a nickel lest he should 
regard it as some strange, unknown foreign 
coin. West Palm Beach is full of ordinary 
people who are unacquainted with wheel- 
chairs and think nothing of walking two or 
three blocks, or even as much as half a mile 
if the necessity arises. They frequently get 
along for days at a time without spending 

13 



14 SUN HUNTING 

more than two dollars and eighty-five cents 
a day. 

West Palm Beach has the same sort of 
climate that Palm Beach has, but the air of 
the place is somehow different. At Palm 
Beach one has the feeling that he is breath- 
ing the very same air that the world's 
greatest bankers and society people are 
breathing, whereas over in West Palm 
Beach one doesn't know or care who has 
been breathing the air. That is why so 
many people find the Palm Beach climate 
very invigorating, but always feel that the 
climate of West Palm Beach leaves them a 
little weak and tired. 

Palm Beach, then, is a long narrow strip 
of land with the ocean on one side and 
Lake Worth on the other. The largest hotel, 
which has room for thirteen hundred paying 
guests at any one time, fronts on Lake 
Worth; while the next largest hotel is 
directly across the narrow strip of land, 
fronting on the ocean. In between are golf 



THE TIME-KILLERS 15 

links, and roadways edged with palms and 
avenues of towering, feathery, bluish-green 
Australian pines and simple little cottages 
that couldn't have cost a cent more than 
forty or fifty thousand dollars, and modest 
little shacks that might have set their owners 
back half a million or so, and club-houses 
and bathing pavilions and more palms and 
broad white roadways and men in white flan- 
nels and women in diamonds and perfumery 
and clinging gowns — and more palms. 

Over everything there is an odor of 
money. Every breeze that blows is freighted 
with its rich, fragrant musky smell; and 
every person that one encounters on the 
street or in a hotel lobby seems to be about 
to spend a lot of it or to have just finished 
spending a lot of it. Some people seem to 
like the odor and some don't seem to care so 
much for it. Some, in fact, seem from their 
expressions to think that this money-odor 
has a great deal in common with smoldering 
rubber or asafetida. 



i6 SUN HUNTING 

The impression that Palm Beach is bound 
to make on any newcomer is one of general 
discomfort. Everybody seems to be staring 
critically and curiously at everybody else — 
due, of course, to the fact that almost every- 
body hopes or suspects that everybody else 
may prove to be Charley Schwab or Percy 
Rockefeller or E. T. Stotesbury or one of 
those prominent society people who part 
their names on the side. 

People who enter and leave the hotel din- 
ing-room don't seem to know what to do 
with their hands. They pretend to an em- 
barrassing ease of manner, which leaves 
everybody acutely conscious that they are 
very uneasy. The people at the tables can't 
keep their eyes off the people at other tables. 
The hotel lobbies are congested before lunch 
and after dinner with persons who have no 
interest in any scenery except that which 
other people are wearing. Although the 
beach at Palm Beach is many miles in length, 
all the bathers, near bathers and bather- 



THE TIME-KILLERS 17 

watchers cram themselves each noon into a 
few square yards of beach and watch one 
another Hke a gathering of lynxes. 

People dawdle along the palm-fringed 
avenues and stare at one another blankly and 
questioningly. People sit self-consciously 
in wheel-chairs and look searchingly at peo- 
ple in other wheel-chairs. Bicyclists wheel 
languidly along the white roads and gaze 
intently at every one. "Are you Charley 
Schwab?" each eye seems to ask mutely. 
"Are you one of the Stotesburys? Are you 
anybody?'' 



CHAPTER IV 

OF THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE BICYCLE OF THE USES 

OF WHEEL-CHAIRS — AND OF THE MENTAL 
ACTIVITIES OF CHAIR-CHAUFFEURS 

Palm Beach is the heaven of the bicycle. 
In other parts of the world it has sunk in 
popular esteem until it is little else than a 
conveyer of telegraph boys and an instru- 
ment for the removal of skin from children's 
knees. But in Palm Beach it shares with 
the wheel-chair the honor of being the 
chariot of wealth and beauty. 

Flocks of bicycles are parked beside every 
hotel entrance. Broad and flawless side- 
walks are reserved for bicycles and wheel- 
chairs. The pedestrian who sets foot on 
them does so at his own risk, and is more 
than apt, if he does so, to have his coat 
driven several inches into his back by the 
front wheel of a bicycle. 
i8 



THE TIME-KILLERS 19 

There is no bicycle costume. Beautiful 
lady bicyclists wear anything: rakish sport 
clothes, fragile afternoon gowns, flowing 
costumes with long capes, and more extreme 
evening gowns. Large numbers of girls 
persist in bicycling while wearing tight 
skirts, so that the general effect is some- 
what similar to that of a pony ballet made 
up as messenger boys. 

On side-streets, one frequently sees the 
almost forgotten spectacle of a frail debu- 
tante learning to ride. On the dance floor 
she would float along as lightly as a tuft of 
thistledown. On a bicycle she wabbles heav- 
ily and helplessly from side to side, collaps- 
ing at intervals against her instructor with 
all the crushing weight of a California Red- 
wood. 

The wheel-chair is the favorite Palm 
Beach method of locomotion, and it is the 
only form of exercise ever taken by many 
Palm Beach visitors. Many old inhabitants 
claim that wheel-chair riding is excellent for 



20 SUN HUNTING 

the liver, and devote at least two hours to it 
every afternoon. The negro chair chauf- 
feurs drive the chair along by vigorous ped- 
aling, and the alternate leg stroke gives the 
chair a gentle side to side motion which acts 
as a mild massage on the occupant. Two 
hours of such exercise is considered to be 
about enough by the most conservative Palm 
Beachers. It is their belief that the persons 
who ride for three hours run a great risk of 
over-exerting themselves. 

The chair-chauffeurs, in addition to pos- 
sessing tireless legs, are usually supplied 
with a vast fund of knowledge. This is most 
desirable ; for many visitors speak to no one 
except the hotel clerks, the news-stand girls, 
the waiters and their wheel-chair chauffeurs 
during their entire stay. It frequently hap- 
pens that their chair chauffeurs are their 
only guides, philosophers and friends ; so the 
chauffeurs find it very valuable to be fairly 
familiar with all Palm Beach estates, to have 
a comprehensive grasp of the flora and 




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Bradley's, the Monte Carlo of America. 




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The Casino at Palm Beach, where the photographers catch the society- 
favorites reading from left to right. 



THE TIME-KILLERS 21 

fauna of the south, and to be conversant 
with all financial and social matters apper- 
taining to the old-timer. They have also 
found that a frank exposition of their own 
philosophical meditations on men and things 
will sometimes arouse the interest and stimu- 
late the generosity of their charges. "What 
sort of ducks are those, George?" usually 
brings the intelligent answer: "Those ain't 
no sort, suh. Those is just ducks." A 
query as to whether a wheel-chair is harder 
to push with one or two people in it brought 
the reply that there "wasn't no difference." 
But to push an empty one is the hardest, 
•Yes, suh! Must be because no money is 
being made. lYes, suh ! 



CHAPTER V 

OF THE TELEGRAM -EX PECTERS — OF THE DATE- 
GUESSERS — ^AND OF THE STATISTIC-WEEVILS 

There are many lonely men and women 
at Palm Beach who almost cry with grati- 
tude when somebody speaks to them. They 
are like many Congressmen, who are big 
people at home, but of less account in Wash- 
ington than a head porter. Out of all the 
people who flock to Palm Beach to spend 
large amounts of money and bask in the 
soothing rays that emanate from the socially 
prominent, ninety per cent, might be com- 
pared to very small potatoes in a two hun- 
Hred-acre lot. Even the majority of the peo- 
ple whose names are names to conjure with 
in Palm Beach society can't be found in the 
pages of Who's Who. 
. The majority of men who pay the bills af 
the big hotels are forced to struggle hard to 
kill time when they have finished their golf- 

22 



THE TIME-KILLERS 23 

playing for the day. Enormous numbers of 
them seem to spend most of their spare time 
sitting dolefully around hotel lobbies and 
expecting telegrams that never come. If 
you fall into conversation with any man in 
any Palm Beach hotel lobby, he invariably 
explains his inactivity by saying that he is 
expecting a telegram. 

Next to expecting telegrams, the most 
popular Palm Beach time-killer seems to 
consist of wondering what day of the week 
it is. Sneak up behind any two important- 
looking men who seem to be discussing af- 
fairs of moment, and the chances are ten to 
one that you will hear the following weighty 
conversation : 

"Is to-day Tuesday or Wednesday? I 
sort of lose track down here." 

"To-day? Why to-day's Wednesday. 
No; hold on! It's Thursday, isn't it?" 

"No, I don't think so. I think it's either 
Tuesday or Wednesday. Still, I 'don't 
know : it might be Thursday." 



24 SUN HUNTING 

"No, I don't believe it's Thursday. I was 
expecting a telegram on Tuesday, and it 
would have had to come before Thursday. 
I guess it's Wednesday." 

"Yes, I guess it is. I thought for a while 
It was Tuesday." 

"Oh, I don't believe it's Tuesday." 

"No, I guess it's Wednesday, all right. 
That telegram ought to be here by now. 
How long are you staying here?" 

"I don't know. I'm expecting a telegram 
and I can't tell till it gets here." 

Having reached a comparatively ripe inti- 
macy by this time, it is almost inevitable that 
one of them should advance one of the thou- 
sand statistical questions that are so fre- 
quently encountered at Palm Beach, such as 
"Did you ever stop to think how many nails 
it took to build this hotel?" A few seconds 
later both of them have produced envelopes 
and are figuring busily. 

Men who have traveled thousands of 
miles for the purpose of killing time at Palm 



THE TIME-KILLERS 25 

Beach will frequently argue for two or three 
hours, and figure all over the backs of eight 
or ten envelopes and a couple of golf scores 
in an attempt to decide whether or not the 
value of all the diamond bracelets in Palm 
Beach would be sufficient to secure eco- 
nomic control of Russia. Newcomers to 
Palm Beach, knowing that America's great- 
est financiers flock there during the season, 
frequently make the mistake of thinking 
that two men knitting their brows over a 
lot of figures are probably two great money- 
kings working up a scheme to corner the na- 
tion's hop crop. In reality they are two 
ordinary citizens killing a little time by 
choking it to death with useless statistics. 



CHAPTER VI 

OF THE CHANGING OF CLOTHES — OF THE WAY THEY 

WEAR 'em AND OF THE FEMALES OF THE 

DRESS-FERRET SPECIES 

Compared with the good old days when 
dresses hooked up the back in such an 
intricate fashion that one needed blueprints, 
diagrams and charts in order to hook up a 
dress properly, there is practically no dress- 
changing at Palm Beach nowadays. In the 
old days the womenfolk spent at least forty 
per cent, of their waking hours changing 
their clothes. They changed their clothes 
whenever the wind changed. They changed 
their clothes every time a train came in. They 
couldn't eat or go out in a wheel-chair or 
put on a string of beads or take a drink 
without changing their clothes. Their 
menfolk were kept constantly busy hooking 
them up the back. 

26 



THE TIME-KILLERS 27 

To-day things are different. Dresses no 
longer hook up the back with their erstwhile 
whole-heartedness. Careful and competent 
observers state that many present-day 
dresses are safely attached to the human 
frame by as few as three hooks, all of which 
can be reached without dislocating an arm 
or displacing any vertebrae, and that an 
equal number of dresses are merely slid on 
over the head and worn just as they fall, 
without any further formality. A great 
many women at Palm Beach wear only two 
costumes each day — one for morning and 
afternoon that shows almost everything be- 
low the hips and one for evening that shows 
almost everything above the waist. 

Not so many years ago a woman who wore 
only two dresses in one day at Palm Beach 
would have been regarded as mentally un- 
balanced or disgustingly pauperized. 

The real snappy dressers, however, get in 
and out of three costumes a day; while it is 
not at all unusual to find prominent society 



28 SUN HUNTING 

camp-followers staggering in and out of as 
many as five and six daily costumes. How 
they ever do it will ever remain a mystery to 
us simple writers and oatmeal-manufactur- 
ers and mattress-makers from the buck- 
wheat belt. 

Every morning directly after breakfast, 
the hotel lobbies fill up with women who 
want to talk about dress. The Palm Beach 
dailies and weeklies cater to their pitiable 
weakness by specializing on thrilling infor- 
mation of this nature. So far as the female 
contingent at Palm Beach is concerned, an 
economic conference in Europe or a. presiden- 
tial utterance on the Bonus hasn't a chance 
with such news as what Mrs. Harry Payne 
Whitney wore at the Beach Club last night. 

Outside the warm sun may be beating 
down upon golden sands and an azure sea, 
the wind rustling softly through the palms 
and the bland air thrilling to the melodious 
murmur of the wheel-chair boys as they 
point out the Stotesbury cottage with caus- 



THE TIME-KILLERS 29 

tic comments on the height of the Stotesbury 
wall. Yet the dress-ferrets sit on with 
bated breaths in the cool gloom of the hotel 
lobbies while the papers inform their en- 
thralled readers that: 

"Very smart was the slate colored strictly 
tailored suit worn by Mrs. Aurelius Vander- 
souse, Jr., at a recent Poinciana luncheon. 
Her hat was of a tone of straw perfectly 
harmonizing with the suit and bore only a 
flat bow of tomato-wire for trimming. The 
Honorable Mrs. D. Dryver Flubyer's suit 
was fashioned of an imported bed-ticking 
fabric guiltless of any embellishment Her 
chapeau was fashioned of the same fabric. 
Mrs. J. Eaton Swank wore a clinging gown 
of f romage-de-brie crepe in a light heliotrope 
shade, fashioned in a one-piece style, with 
flowing sleeves and uneven hem, whose folds 
clung gracefully to the tall slender wearer." 

That's the stuff to give the Palm Beach 
Battalion of Dress. Like Bosco, they eat it 
alive. They are veritable cormorants for it. 



CHAPTER VII 

OF THE FASCINATIONS OF THE BEACH — OF THE 

SAND-HOUNDS FROM ODESSA AND ELSEWHERE 

—AND OF PRUDES AND STYLISH STOUTS 

At half past eleven every morning, stimu- 
lated by the early morning talk of dress, all 
the feminine population of Palm Beach, ac- 
companied by all obtainable male escorts, set 
out from their hotels and homes in wheel- 
chairs for their daily pilgrimage to the 
beach. 

The beach is not prized by Palm Beach 
visitors because of its bathing facilities, but 
because of the perfect spirit of camaraderie 
and democracy which reigns there. A 
Philadelphia Biddle is just as apt as not to 
come along and accidentally rub damp sand 
on a South Bend Smith. Anything may 
happen. A Yanderbilt may ask you what 
time it is. 

30 



THE TIME-KILLERS 31 

There is no distinction on the beach itself 
between the people who emigrated from 
Montana to Fifth Avenue back in '01 and 
the people who emigrated from Odessa to 
Houston Street back in '91. Both of them 
have the same funny knobs on their knees; 
and there are lots of them — especially of the 
Odessa set. 

The beach is the only place in Palm Beach 
where everybody has an equal chance; and 
there everybody uses the same ocean and sits 
around in the same sand in almost hopeless 
confusion. Things are so congested that if 
one leans back carelessly and braces himself 
by sticking his hand down in the sand, the 
chances are excellent that a couple of ladies 
from Kansas City or Boston will come 
staggering along with their eyes fixed raptly 
on Mrs. B. Gurney Munn or Mrs. Jerome 
Bonaparte and sheer off two or three of one's 
fingers with their French heels. 

The only portion of the beach which any- 
body considers worth using is the portion 



3^ SUN HUNTING 

Hirectly in front of the casino, which is a 
large, gorgeous, white plaster bath-house 
with an outdoor swimming pool and polite 
attendants who are always appearing at 
inopportune moments and helping patrons to 
do things which they could do much better 
alone — such, for example, as removing a 
towel from a hook or lifting a, brush and 
comb from a shelf. 

Many people garbed in elaborate dresses 
stand on the terrace in front of the casino 
and stare down at the people on the beach, 
while the people on the beach stare up at 
them. On chairs on the beach there are 
many other elaborately gowned women who 
examine every one closely and are closely 
examined by every one. 

Down in front of the entire mob stand 
large numbers of professional photogra- 
phers who keep a careful lookout for exciting 
costumes and prominent faces, and con- 
stantly snap little groups of laughing people 
who subsequently appear in leading Sunday 



THE TIME-KILLERS 33 

papers or monthly magazines over legends 
like: "Far from Northern Snows: a happy 
society group on the Palm Beach sands: 
from left to right, J. Edge Smush, Mrs. B. 
Goodwin Eezy, the Honorable Mrs. Claribel 
Custard, I. Winken Ogle, Miss Patricia 
Swaddle. Behind the feet at the right, 
Perry Peevish, Jr." 

Every little while the photographers find 
some one who is prominent and pretty with- 
out being too much overweight and over- 
dressed ; and when they do, they coax her out 
to an unoccupied section of beach and 
arrange her in a position of unstudied ease 
and graceful carelessness, and shoot half a 
dozen pictures of her admiring the distant 
horizon with a gay, unaffected, girlish 
laugh. 

Everything on the beach is so simple an'd 
natural and wholesome that one can't help 
but like it. Then, too, one never gets that 
offensive, salty, seaweedy odor of ocean 
that one is apt to get on the New England 



34 SUN HUNTING 

coast, owing to the ocean odors being com- 
pletely overwhelmed by the rare and power- 
ful French perfumes that are worn by many 
elements of Palm Beach society. If one 
closed his eyes, he might think that he was 
at a perfumery show and that somebody had 
kicked over all the bottles. 

Palm Beach is not exactly what one would 
call a Prude's Paradise, but a prude can feel 
' more at ease on the beach at Palm Beach 
than at any other resort in Florida. This is 
due to the fact that women are not allowed 
to appear on the beach with any portion of 
the leg uncovered. A policeman is stationed 
on the beach to see that this rule is enforced, 
and there is a great rejoicing among all the 
local prudes, who — like all prudes through- 
out the world — see evil where there is none, 
and pass blindly by the evils that every one 
except themselves can see. 

This rule has brought about one great 
benefit in that it has prevented large num- 
bers of ill-advised and otherwise charming 



THE TIME-KILLERS 35 

stylish stouts from rolling down their bath- 
ing stockings and exposing too much knee. 
Any rule that does this is a good rule — and 
it is generally agreed that there are more 
stylish stouts at Palm Beach than at any 
other resort on earth. 



CHAPTER VIII 

OF THE THREE DAY SUCKERS OF TRUE SMARTNESS— 

AND OF THE BUCKWHEATS AND THE DEAD-LINE 

When the bathing hour has passed into 
history, the merry bathers and clothes-wear- 
ers sally forth in search of lunch. The ordi- 
nary run of Palm Beach visitors eat their 
lunch at their hotels. This act almost auto- 
matically stamps them as Buckwheats, or 
Three Day Suckers, or people who aren't 
Smart. A Buckwheat is a coarse, rude, bar- 
baric person who is addicted to the secret 
and loathsome vices of eating buckwheat 
cakes for breakfast and not spending money 
recklessly. 

A Three Day Sucker is a person who only 
stays a few days at Palm Beach. As a time- 
killer he is not regarded with any respect. 
He travels so far to kill time that he hasn't 

36 



THE TIME-KILLERS 37 

any time left to kill when he gets there. This 
is not regarded as smart. Any one who 
stays less than two weeks is not viewed witK 
favor by people who stay a month or more, 
and who know how important smartness is. 
If one wishes to have the respect of the; 
cigar-counter clerks and the mail clerks and 
the head w^aiters and other Palm Beach 
people who — as the ultra-refined advertise- 
ments say — ^matter, one must above all 
things be smart. You might as well be 
dead at Palm Beach as not be smart. 

Certain things are smart and certain 
things are not smart. It is smart, for 
example, for a man to go without a hat. It 
is smart to ride a bicycle. Any article of 
feminine wearing apparel that is essentially 
useless is smart. It is smart to speak of a 
thing as smart. It is not at all smart to tell 
a Palm Beacher that you would gladly dis- 
embowel him when you hear him use the 
word "smart" for the fiftieth time. 

None of the big Palm Beach hotels rents 



38 SUN HUNTING 

rooms without meals. One must pay for his 
meals as well. Two people at most of the 
big hotels pay a minimum rate of about 
thirty- five dollars a day for the two — which 
is about the amount from which the same 
people would have to separate themselves at 
any of the big New York or Chicago or Bos- 
ton or Washington hotels by the time they 
had finished paying for their food. But if 
one wishes to be smart at Palm Beach, one 
mustn't lunch or dine at the hotel where 
one's meals are included on his bill. It is 
very buckwheat to do such a thing: very 
uncouth: very hick and very rough-neck: 
not, in a word, smart. That is why the de- 
sirable Palm Beach habitues, at the height 
of the season, find it difficult to spend less 
than a hundred dollars apiece per day. One 
can't indulge in games of chance or keep 
many wheel-chairs on that amount; but if 
one is reasonably careful and content to be 
only moderately smart, one can get along 
fairly well for a hundred dollars a day. 



THE TIME-KILLERS 39 

The truly smart person strives always to 
pay for two meals where one would nor- 
mally be paid for. He strives to pay for one 
that he eats and for one that nobody eats. 
If one is living at the Poinciana, one should 
make an effort to lunch or dine at the Break- 
ers or at the Country Club or at the Beach 
Club or at the Everglades Club, or one of 
the cottages. It is a fascinating system, 
and is based on the familiar society theory 
that the more useless a thing is, the smarter 
it is. 

One of the smartest — in a society sense — 
of all the persons that come to Palm Beach 
is a man who never eats at the hotel where 
he lives, and who keeps a flock of twelve 
wheel-chairs always in attendance on him. 
Day and night his twelve wheel-chairs are 
waiting for him and his friends. They are 
used about an hour a day — but it is very 
smart to keep them waiting: frightfully 
smart. Useless and therefore smart. 

The head waiters in the restaurants be- 



40 SUN HUNTING 

come very proficient at distinguishing those 
who are smart from those who are not 
smart. In the dining-room of the largest 
hotel there is a cross-strip of green carpet 
which is known as the dead-line. The people 
who sit between the entrance and the dead- 
line have been carefully looked over by the 
head waiter and put in the smart class. But 
the people who are put on the kitchen side 
of the dead-line are dubs and Buckwheats 
in the judgment of the head waiter. Once 
people are put below the dead-line, they 
rarely have a chance to come up for air, but 
are doomed to stay down among the other 
Buckwheats for the remainder of their visit. 



CHAPTER IX 

OF THE SMARTEST THING IN PALM BEACH OF 

LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY AND OF THE OLD GUARD 

The smartest thing at Palm Beach is the 
Everglades Club. The Everglades Club is 
so smart that it almost gives itself a pain. 
It has only a few over four hundred mem- 
bers, but these four hundred include names 
that make a society editor's scalp tingle, and 
control so much money and jewels that the 
mere mention of them is enough to make 
any normal burglar tremble all over. 

The Everglades Club building was started 
in the summer of 1918 by Paris Singer, who 
is a wealthy society man, as a hospital for 
convalescent officers. The war was over, 
however, before the building was ever used 
as a hospital ; and it immediately occurred to 
the smartest of the Palm Beach colony that 

41 



42 SUN HUNTING 

the building was exactly the thing to use for 
a smart club where really smart people could 
go off by themselves and be too exclusive for 
words. The proposition was put up to Paris 
Singer, who saw the force of it ; and that's 
how the Everglades Club started. The ini- 
tiation fee and yearly dues might be ex- 
pected to be about as large as the national 
debt, but in reality they amount to some- 
thing like one hundred dollars initiation fee 
and fifty dollars yearly dues. The club has 
built a very smart and attractive apartment- 
house within a stone's throw of the parent 
building; and in it club members can rent 
small but smart apartments for a mere 
twenty-five hundred dollars a season — and 
there are several Maine summer resorts 
where one pays as much and gets much less 
for his money. 

The club has its own golf links and tennis 
courts; and it has a restaurant whose chef 
could easily enter a cheffing contest with 
the leading Parisian chefs with an excellent 



THE TIME-KILLERS 43 

chance to win the diamond-studded skillet, 
or the seventeen- jeweled egg-beater. It is 
my fixed belief that if old M'sieu Mar- 
guery, who invented Filet of Sole Marguery, 
could have been led into the dining-room of 
the Everglades Club and placed where he 
could look out through the palms to the pla- 
cid waters of Lake Worth, and handed a 
platter of Pompano Meuniere — it is my fixed 
belief, I say, that old M'sieu Marguery 
would have put his head down in his hands 
and cried like a child to think that he could 
have doubled his fortune if he could have 
started serving Pompano that way thirty 
years ago. 

The interior fixtures of the Everglades 
Club are of the proper sort to go with such 
food. The walls are hung with sixteenth' 
century tapestries, and the dining-room is 
wainscoted with oak from the interior of a; 
Spanish monastery. 

There was some talk at one time of cover- 
ing the wall of one room with silver plates 



44 SUN HUNTING 

made by flattening the silver cocktail shakers 
of the club members. This was never done, 
however; and it is probable that the mem- 
bers found other uses for their shakers. 

It would be idle to attempt to estimate 
with any accuracy the amount of money 
represented by members of the Everglades 
Club. If they were pushed, they could easily 
dig up one billion dollars among them. 

While we are speaking in billions instead 
of in mere beggarly millions, it might be 
appropriate to mention that the most astute 
Palm Beach estimaters figure that the thir- 
teen hundred guests who fill the Royal 
Poinciana Hotel at the height of the season, 
if placed in one room and carefully assayed, 
would yield at least two billion dollars. 

The Country Club is another smart place 
iat which to lunch or dine. There is no 
restaurant in Europe to my knowledge that 
is able to produce a better dinner than the 
Palm Beach Country Club, especially if one 
leaves it, as the saying goes, to Frangois. 



THE TIME-KILLERS 45 

FratiQoIs is the head waiter ; and he works in 
conjunction with a chef named Marius, who 
inherited most of his recipes from a gifted 
relative in the south of France, and who 
spends a large part of his time when not 
cooking in fearing that somebody will solve 
the recipes. The chief object of the Coun- 
try Club IS to provide a golfing retreat from 
the Buckwheats and the Three Day Suck- 
ers, who usually break for the hotel golf 
links immediately on arrival. Consequently 
the links which are open to the Buckwheats 
are apt to become so congested that if one 
doesn't stick rigidly in his place in the golf 
procession, he is more than apt to get a 
couple of golf balls in the side of the head! 
and then have to stand aside for two hours 
while a long parade of golfers and near- 
golfers hacks its way past him. So the 
smart golfers go to the Country Club. It is 
there that one finds the Old Guard of Palm 
Beach. 

The Old Guard is a hide-bound organiza- 



46 SUN HUNTING 

tion of ardent golfers who know all the in- 
timate personal scandal about practically; 
every dollar that has changed hands in NortH 
America since the Dutch purchased Manhat- 
tan Island from the Indians for twenty- 
four dollars, and threw in enough rum to 
provide magnificent hang-overs for the 
families of the original owners. 

One must have been a resident of Palm 
Beach for five years before he is allowed to 
join the Old Guard, the theory being that 
unless a golfer has lived there for five years, 
he is not thoroughly conversant with the 
essential features of Palm Beach gossip and 
will be apt to interrupt a calm and quiet game 
of golf to ask who the G. Daley Squabbles 
are going to marry when they have divorced 
each other, or some other equally irrelevant 
and unnecessary question. 



CHAPTER X 

OF THOSE WHO WISH TO CRASH INTO SOCIETY — AND 

OF THOSE WHO FURNISH THE PALPITATING 

SOCIETY ITEMS 

The business of being smart and appear- 
ing at the proper places at the proper hour 
is merely the accepted method of killing 
time with many Palm Beachers; but with 
many others it is as serious as the death of a 
near relative. Palm Beach is well sprinkled 
with people who are determined to break into 
New York society, and who have selected 
Palm Beach as the place to drive the enter- 
ing wedge because results can be obtained 
there with greater speed, with less expense 
and with more noise than in any other sec- 
tion of the country. 

A young New Yorker with a small income 
broke into society with a crash and married, 
not so very long ago, a beautiful widow 

47 



48 SUN HUNTING 

with a strangle-hold on society and a fortune 
that kept a couple of income tax experts 
working a month each year. He explained 
his system to a friend of mine with the pecu- 
liar half childish and half idiotic frankness 
that may frequently be encountered in the 
upper crust of society. If he had attempted 
to break in by way of New York, he said, 
he would have spent all his money on din- 
ners and luncheons; and about as much no- 
tice would have been taken of his struggles 
as would be taken of a stray dish of prunes 
at a banquet. But by coming to Palm Beach 
and getting on the right side of the society 
reporters, he was able to give one fair-sized 
and comparatively inexpensive luncheon and 
have the news telegraphed immediately to 
the New York papers. By doing this a 
couple of times a season, he was able to 
repay all the invitations which he accepted 
in New York; and it was apparent to all 
New York newspaper readers that he was 
making a society splash at Palm Beach. So 



THE TIME-KILLERS 49 

he was soon accepted as being socially promi- 
nent, whereupon he picked out the richest 
thing in sight, married it and stopped worry- 
ing. 

Many people at Palm Beach feel that they 
must have press agents to keep them in the 
limelight. There is one enterprising Palm 
Beach press agent who supplies the news- 
papers with palpitating items about seven 
or eight social climbers, and whose earnings 
from this source are over thirty thousand a 
year. When one reads of a socially promi- 
nent Palm Beacher doing something fear- 
fully original, like giving a dinner to all her 
friends' dogs, one may know that she has 
been hiring a press agent to fill her mind 
with valuable ideas. 



I 



CHAPTER XI 

OF THE ALIBI WINDOW — OF THE TRICK FLASKS AND 

CANES — OF DRINKERS FRAIL AND FAT — AND OF 

ONE CONCEPTION OF SIMPLICITY 

The Palm Beach crowd is always ready 
to part with money for anything that looks 
sufficiently smart and interesting. In order 
to facilitate the parting, some of the coun- 
try's leading costumers and rug merchants 
and hat makers and jewelers have moved 
their branch stores into the hotel lobbies, so 
that the passers-by can separate themselves 
from their money with a minimum of exer- 
tion. 

There is one Palm Beach window that is 
known as the Alibi Window. It is full 
of gorgeous diamond pendants and diamond 
bracelets and simple little ten-thousand-dol- 
lar rings ; and the Palm Beach theory is that 
the shop's best customers are men who have 

50 



THE TIME-KILLERS 51 

been raising what is somewhat loosely 
known as the dickens. As is well known, a 
man whose conscience is troubling him can 
frequently keep it quiet by getting his wife 
a pendant of diamonds set in platinum. At 
night, when the shop is locked up, all the 
jewelry is removed from the window and 
replaced with a large flock of frosted silver 
cocktail-shakers whose appearance alone is 
warranted to give even a Prohibition En- 
forcement Agent a thirst. This spectacle is 
supposed to make the observer hunt up 
some whisky and get himself nicely boiled, 
and possibly to make him fall so low as to 
speak disrespectfully of the society leaders. 
On the following day he buys jewelry to 
square himself with his wife. 

Large, curved pocket flasks, two of which 
would make fine protective armor for the 
entire upper part of the body if worn on 
opposite sides, are popular at Palm Beacfi^ 
as is a new trick cane that unscrews at a 
joint and reveals a long, slender bottle three- 



52 SUN HUNTING 

quarters of an inch in diameter and two 
feet long. The popularity of these canes, 
which come in half-pint and pint sizes, in- 
dicate clearly that some enterprising hat 
manufacturer will soon get out a two-pint 
straw hat for Florida wear. 

There is a great deal of fire-water in 
sight at Palm Beach at all hours of the day 
and night; and the debutante who can't 
absorb eight cocktails without raising her 
voice or falling over the chairs is regarded 
as being handicapped by some sort of inher- 
ited weakness. One of the most frequently 
pointed-out personages at Palm Beach is a 
very fat man who can — according to the 
claims made for him by his admirers — 
drink thirty-five cocktails at one sitting 
without blinking. The price of Scotch 
whisky starts down around forty dollars a 
case in the summer time and works grad- 
ually upward until at the height of the sea- 
son one is paying from seventy to one hun- 
dred dollars a case for it. 



THE TIME-KILLERS 53 

The building-boom that has struck Palm 
Beach in the last five years is claimed by 
most of the loose claimers and enthusiastic 
drinkers to be due to Prohibition. A great 
many cottages have been erected by persons 
of wealth and social prominence in these 
five years; and the prevalent architectural 
idea for a simple little Palm Beach cottage 
seems to be a Spanish modification of a 
Union Station, or a Court of Jewels at a 
successful World's Fair. 

To hear the drinkers tell it, these houses 
have been built so that the owners could 
have a place in which to drink without being 
watched or hurried or made to feel uncom- 
fortable. This may be possible; but if it is, 
the house builders are the only ones who 
haven't felt free to drink when and where 
they choose. 

The truth of the matter unquestionably is 
that the people who built houses liked the 
place and the climate, and so built in order 
to enjoy them more thoroughly than they 



54 SUN HUNTING 

could be enjoyed in a hotel room smelling 
faintly of damp carpets and previous occu- 
pants. 



CHAPTER XII 

OF NUTS IN THE COCONUT GROVE — OF BRADLEY^S — 

OF THE RELAXATION AND AMUSEMENT OF THE 

BEACH CLUB-FELLOWS — AND OF GAMBLING 

IN GENERAL 

After one has spent a fatiguing after- 
noon pricing whisky flasks, or being pushed 
along avenues of palms and Australian 
pines in a wheel-chair, or indulging in a little 
steady bridge and drinking, or some other 
equally arduous pursuit, the smart thing to 
do is to go to the Coconut Grove and partici- 
pate in a little tea and dancing. 

The Coconut Grove consists of a large 
and beautiful grove of coconut trees sur- 
roundirf^ a polished dance floor. All the 
coconuts have been removed from the trees, 
owing to their well-known habit of falling 
off unexpectedly and utterly ruining any 
one who may be lingering beneath them. 
Thus the only nuts in the grove are the ones 
who come there to dance. 
55 



56 SUN HUNTING 

The Q)conut Grove starts doing business 
at half past five every afternoon in the 
bright sunHght; but in a few minutes the 
tropic night closes down just as advertised 
in all books on the South Seas. By a little 
after six o'clock the only illumination comes 
from strings of red electric light bulbs 
strung through the palms and from the oc- 
casional flare of a match as some distin- 
guished social butterfly tries to find out how 
much whisky he has left in his cane. 

Later in the evening, the smart thing to 
do is to go over to what is formally known 
as the Beach Club, but universally spoken 
of as Bradley's. As trains from the north 
enter the Palm Beach station, the enormous 
bulk of the Royal Poinciana Hotel stretches 
out at the right of the train. On the left of 
the train, directly opposite the station and 
so close to the train that the traveler could 
toss even a lightweight biscuit on to its roof 
from the car window, is a long, low, white 
frame building with a large revolving ven^ 




Near the Flagler estate at Palm Beach. 




The Australian Pine Walk between the Poinciana and The Breakers, 
Palm Beach. 



THE TIME-KILLERS 57 

tilator in one end. This is Bradley^s, Palm 
Beach's oldest, most celebrated and most 
popular charitable institution — charitable 
because it assists people who have more 
money than they know what to do with to 
get rid of part of it in a quiet and eminently 
respectable way. 

Every large resort in the world that ca- 
ters to wealthy people has its gambling 
houses. In Europe the municipalities run 
them, recognizing the fact that all people of 
means who are on a holiday are bound to 
gamble. At America's resorts the gambling 
houses are usually concealed; but they exist 
none the less; and usually, because of the 
secrecy that surrounds them, they are lurk- 
ing-places for troublesome aggregations of 
trimmers, bloodsuckers and crooks of va- 
rious sorts. 

Bradley's is different. It is run exclu- 
sively for the wealthy northern patrons of 
Palm Beach; and the person whose legal 
residence or place of business is located in 



58 SUN HUNTING 

Florida is supposed to be barred. Almost 
everybody who goes there can afford to 
lose and lose heavily; and a list of the names 
of the people who play there every night 
would read like a list of America's leading 
celebrities, social lights and millionaires. 
There may be some who can't afford to play ; 
but if there are any such, their folly in visit- 
ing Palm Beach marks them as persons who 
deserve to be ruined as expeditiously as pos- 
sible. 

A crook would be about as much at home 
in Bradley's as an icicle would be in the 
crater of Mt. Vesuvius. 

All things considered, it is probably the 
only gambling house in the United States 
whose closing would be a calamity to the 
community. 

Bradley's is a club. In order to be made 
a member, one must be introduced by a mem- 
ber. It is one of the few existing clubs 
which has no initiation fees and no dues; 
but for all that, the members usually spend 



THE TIME-KILLERS * 59 

all they have in their clothes every time they 
go in for an evening of good fellowship and 
club Hfe; so it isn't as inexpensive as it 
sounds. 

Anybody in Palm Beach, from the wheel- 
chair boys to the policemen, can supply the 
inquirer with all the standard Beach Club 
stories, usually starting with the one about 
the man who lost six thousand dollars in 
one evening and left Palm Beach hurriedly 
the next morning. A few hours later, one 
of the Bradley brothers was visited by a 
young woman who was obviously in great 
distress. Her eyes were red and swollen 
and she was sobbing convulsively. She ex- 
plained that her husband had lost six thou- 
sand dollars the night before, that the 
money didn't belong to him and that unless 
she could get the money back for him, he 
would have to go to prison. So Bradley 
gave back the six thousand dollars after tell- 
ing the young woman to tell her husband 
never again to set foot in the Beach Club. A 



6o SUN HUNTING 

few days afterward the same man turned up 
in the Beach Club and began to play. Bradley 
summoned him to his office and asked him 
how he dared to do such a thing after his 
losses had been returned to his wife. "What 
do you mean?'' asked the man, "I'm not 
married." 

"Then you didn't leave town because you 
were ruined?" asked Bradley. 

"You bet I didn't!" said the man. "I 
went down to Long Key fishing with my 
business partner, who came down here with 



me. 



A woman in an adjoining room had heard 
the two men talking before their departure, 
and had cashed in on the conversation. 

Then there is the story about the wife 
who used to extract uncashed chips from 
her husband's clothes whenever he played 
at Bradley's, and who cashed them in for 
twenty-five thousand dollars without her 
husband knowing that he had lost anything. 
And the one about the gentleman who 



THE TIME-KILLERS 6i 

cleaned up seventy thousand dollars in one 
week. 

It is not at all unusual to see one of the big 
steel men or oil men placing five hundred 
dollars in chips on the board at each turn 
of the v^heel, and dropping fifteen or twenty 
thousand dollars in half an hour. 



CHAPTER XIII 

OF THE DIVERGENCES BETWEEN BRADLEY'S AND 
MONTE CARLO — OF THE IDIOSYNCRASIES OF THE 

LITTLE WHITE PILL OF THE ODDITIES OF 

FAT PLAYERS — OF TIME-KILLING PAS- 
TIMES — AND OF THE WISDOM OF 
DIONYSIUS THE ELDER 

Kbout the only similarity between Brad- 
ley's and the Monte Carlo Casino is the 
squareness of the game and the roundness 
of the roulette wheels. A majority of the 
people who gamble at Bradley's are the ex- 
treme opposite of the majority of the people 
who gamble at Monte Carlo; and in these 
two gambling houses any observer may dis- 
cover an outstanding difference between the 
European's and the American's attitude 
toward money. For years Americans have 
been disparaged by Europeans as money- 
grubbers. As a matter of fact, the people of 
all nations, generally speaking, are money- 
grubbers, in that they devote themselves to 
62 



THE TIME-KILLERS 63 

earning money on which to live. The 
European, however, pursues his money with 
an unrelenting ferocity; and when he over- 
takes it, he seizes it with such an iron grip 
that the head on each coin almost bursts into 
shrill screams of agony. The European 
makes money in order to save it; and he 
never lets go of it if he can help it. The 
American regards money-making as a fas- 
cinating game; and he makes it in order to 
spend it. 

At Monte Carlo almost every gambler, 
out of the thousands that play there, plays a 
system. He uses a system book, checking 
each turn of the wheel in it, and writing 
down column upon column of figures. He 
devotes hours to computing his chances of 
winning; and practically every system player 
believes implicitly that he isn't risking his 
money, but that he has a sure system that 
will enable him to get something from the 
Casino for nothing. He gambles for profit ; 
not for pleasure. 



64 SUN HUNTING 

At Bradley's, nobody plays a system. All 
of the club-members — oil millionaires, steel 
millionaires, short-haired and short-skirted 
debutantes, and fat dowagers half concealed 
behind interlacing ropes of pearls and dia- 
monds — ^play only for the thrill of playing. 
A person who used a system book would 
probably be regarded as being either insane 
or drunk. Nine-tenths of the women don't 
know enough about the game to play any- 
thing except a number full on the nose, or 
red and black. In roulette a number can be 
played full on the nose; and if it turns up 
on the wheel, the player receives thirty-five 
for one. If one is satisfied with smaller 
odds, and with better chances of winning, 
one can place his money between two num- 
bers, or in the middle of four numbers, or on 
a transversal of three numbers, or on a dou- 
ble transversal of six numbers, or in various 
other ways. At Monte Carlo the favorite 
woman's bet is the single and double trans- 
versal. At Bradley's the men, and women 



THE TIME-KILLERS 65 

too, bet almost entirely on single numbers. 
They want the big thrill that comes from 
collecting thirty-five dollars for each dollar 
that they put up. They become foolishly 
stubborn about it, sticking to a single num- 
ber so long that it would have to turn up 
three or four times in succession in order to 
enable them to break even. Fat ladies at 
Bradley's love to take a fat roll of chips in 
one hand and run the hand down a column 
of numbers, allowing the chips to slip off 
their fingertips and stay where they drop. 

There are two gambling rooms in Brad- 
ley's — the big octagonal outer room in which 
there are six roulette tables and two French 
Hazard tables, and the small inner room for 
men only, in which there are three roulette 
tables and one French Hazard table. The 
inner room provides a retreat for the men 
whose attention is constantly distracted in 
the outer room by the frequent demand on 
the part of their wives and daughters for 
another fifty dollars. 



66 SUN HUNTING 

By half past nine o'clock every night, 
Bradley's is so crowded that one must al- 
most fight his way from table to table. No 
matter where one threw a brick in the as- 
semblage, it would be certain to hit a mil- 
lionaire and carom against two other mil- 
lionaires before falling to the floor. Until 
midnight there are usually more women than 
men engaged in observing the idiosyncrasies 
of the little ivory ball ; and the hold-up man 
who succeeded in holding up the clientele 
of the Beach Club at eleven o'clock at night 
would have no difficulty at all in picking up 
at least ten million dollars' worth of loot in 
jewelry alone. Many of the women wear 
their strings of pearls in double and triple 
loops so that they wont trip on them when 
they walk, and most of them seem to think 
that they may get rheumatism if they don't 
wear at least five diamond bracelets on their 
left wrists. 

One frequently sees these ladies rolling 
up the Lake Trail at midnight in wheel- 



THE TIME-KILLERS (yj 

chairs with a quarter million or a half mil- 
lion dollars' worth of jewels sparkling in the 
moonlight. They are merely out taking the 
air, so that they can go back to the party 
which they just left and renew their activi- 
ties without falling asleep. They dance and 
play cards and slip a few cocktails and ex- 
change light persiflage until four and five 
and six o'clock in the morning. 

They grow stronger and stronger as the 
season grows older, until toward the end 
they may be found going in bathing in their 
ballgowns at dawn and indulging in other 
tireless activities. If a tough, hardy Indian 
scout or Alpine mountain climber tried to 
follow them for three days, he'd drop in his 
tracks with fatigue. 

Such is life among the time-killers of 
Palm Beach. They go there to kill time, 
and they are diligent at it. Old man Plu- 
tarch states that "Dionysius the Elder, being 
asked whether he was at leisure, replied, 
'God forbid that it should ever befall me/ " 



68 SUN HUNTING 

The Palm Beach time-killers operate on the 
same principle. The last thing in the world 
that they desire is leisure, and the person 
who argues that Palm Beach is frequented 
by the leisure class is suffering from warped 
perception. They have different ways of 
killing time. Some of them talk it to death 
and some of them worry it to death, and 
some of them smother it with money. No 
time gets by them : they kill it all ; and how- 
ever they choose to do it, they're the hard- 
est working people in the world. 



BOOK TWO 

THE TIN-CANNERS 



CHAPTER I 

OF JANUARY IN THE NORTH — OF THE WINTER PAS- 
TIMES OF MR. AND MRS. CHARLES WALNUT 

AND OF A PENETRATING CHILL 

Scene I of this drama of American man- 
ners is laid in the small and more or less 
flourishing town of East Rockpile in the 
northern state of Massachusetts, Illinois, 
Maine, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, 
Vermont, Ohio or Connecticut. Or Rhode 
Island or Michigan. Or New Hampshire or 
New York. 

The month is January and there are three 
feet of snow on the ground. The tempera- 
ture is so low that the mercury has shriveled 
in the thermometer bulb until it looks like a 
small silver cherry in a cocktail. The feet 
of passers-by make the same sort of squeak 
in the frozen snow that a mouse makes 
when it unexpectedly falls six feet behind a 
bedroom wall at two o'clock in the morning. 

71 



72 SUN HUNTING 

Mrs. Charles Walnut, wife of East 
Rockpile's popular contractor and builder, 
is seated before a roaring open fire in the 
parlor of the Walnut home reading a mail- 
order catalogue. Directly behind her chair 
an oil stove emanates heat-waves and an 
oil-stove odor. In spite of this Mrs. Wal- 
nut shivers perceptibly from time to time and 
hunches herself more firmly into the woolen 
shawl that is wrapped around her shoulders. 
She is studying the portion of the catalogue 
devoted to Gardening Tools. 

There is a loud thumping and kicking 
outside. The front door opens and closes 
with a bang, and a moment later Mr. Wal- 
nut enters the room chafing his ears briskly. 
"My gorry, it's cold!" he observed, moving 
his feet up and down in a gingerly manner. 

"Take off your overshoes, Charles, and 
don't track snow all over the house," replies 
Mrs. Walnut. "What made you so late? 
Did you stop at the drug store? Wasn't 
there any mail? I believe that furnace has 



THE TIN-CANNERS 73 

gone out or something, Charles, and you'd 
better go down and see if you can't do some- 
thing. I had to light the oil stove to keep 
my back from freezing/* 

"That furnace is all right," declares Mr. 
Walnut, sniffling loudly and unbuckling his 
overshoes. " Taint any use trying to heat 
anything in this weather. There wasn't 
anybody at the drug store on account of it 
being so cold. The train was late on account 
of froze switches or something. There 
wasn't any mail except three seed cata- 
logues. My gorry, Emma, one of those 
catalogues has got a picture of a tomato 
eight inches through. The name of it's the 
Great Ruby. We want to get a lot of those 
Great Rubies in May, Emma." 

"Yes," says Mrs. Walnut despondently, 
"and when we get around to picking 'em, 
they'll be about the size of crab apples, and 
we'll feel like Great Rubes." 

"It's the cold weather that makes you feel 
that way, Emma," says Mr. Walnut compas- 



74 SUN HUNTING 

sionately. "In April, when the grass begins 
to get green and the robins begin to sing at 
sun-up, you'll feel better/' 

''Maybe so, Charles," says Mrs. Walnut, 
"but that's three months away. Sometimes 
I wish I could go to sleep like a bear in De- 
cember and sleep until April. Go down and 
fix the furnace and then come to bed. It's 
the only warm place in the house." 

Mr. Walnut leaves the room obediently, 
clumps noisily down the cellar stairs, and is 
soon heard operating on the furnace and de- 
pleting his coal supply. Mrs. Walnut listens 
with a quick succession of shivers to the 
shrill squeaking of sleigh-runners on the 
snow. The fire-whistle sounds three 
hoarse, bronchial notes, marking the arrival 
of nine o'clock and of a meaningless some- 
thing known as curfew. Mrs. Walnut picks 
up the oil stove, clutches her shawl tightly 
against her chest, goes out into the tomb- 
like hall, and is heard mounting the front 
stairs stiffly. 



CHAPTER II 

OP A PRONOUNCED CHANGE OF SCENE — OF A DARING 

GAME OF CHANCE AMID TROPICAL SCENTS ^AND 

OF THE GLOATING OF CHARLES WALNUT 
AND HERMAN BLISTER 

Scene II of this emotional cross-section 
of national life is laid on the outskirts of the 
thriving town of Porgy Inlet, Florida. One 
year has elapsed between Scenes I and 11. 
The month is January. A soft breeze rustles 
the palm-fronds and sets the waters of the 
near-by inlet to lapping soothingly against 
the shore. Electric lights are hung at inter- 
vals between the palms and the moss-hung 
live oaks ; and beneath them are parked auto- 
mobiles of all sizes and shapes. Some of the 
automobiles are bloated and swollen out of 
all semblance to an automobile ; while others 
are obviously automobiles, but have spouted 
great tent-like wens at the side or rear. The 
license plates on these automobiles show that 

75 



ye SUN HUNTING 

they come all the way from Maine, from 
Ohio, from Dakota, from Massachusetts. 
Indiana is heavily represented, as are Michi- 
gan and Illinois, to say nothing of Minne- 
sota, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, 
Oregon, Connecticut, Washington, Vermont 
and a number of other states. 

Around a folding camp-table beneath one 
of the largest and mossiest live oaks sit Mr. 
and Mrs. Charles Walnut of East Rockpile 
and Mr. and Mrs. Herman Blister of Tack- 
hammer, Michigan. Mr. Walnut, as has 
been stated, is a contractor and builder, Mr. 
Blister's business or calling is that of corn- 
farmer. The Walnuts and the Blisters are 
in the act of finishing up an exciting game 
of hearts. "My gorry,'' declares Mr. Wal- 
nut as he slaps down his last card with great 
violence on Mr. Blister's lead, *'my gorry, I 
certainly thought I was going to get stuck 
with that queen of spades!" He figures 
hastily on the back of an envelope. ""'You 
folks owe us seven cents," he announces 



THE TIN-CANNERS ^7 

eventually. Mr. Blister sighs deeply, re- 
moves a shiny black wallet from his trou- 
sers pocket and wrenches seven cents from 
it reluctantly. 

Mrs. Walnut waves a wisp of Spanish 
moss reprovingly at a mosquito that is 
dancing gaily in front of her nose. ''Now, 
Charles/' says she dreamily, ''if you're going 
up the inlet after yellowtails at sun-up 
to-morrow, we've got to be getting to bed. 
You know the last time you sat up late, it 
made you nervous and you lost forty cents 
pitching horseshoes." 

From the water's edge sounds the tinkle 
of a mandolin; a distant quartet toys suc- 
cessfully with Mandy Lee in spite of the 
fact that the tenor is decidedly sour ; a baby 
in a near-by automobile awakes to the woes 
of its new life with a series of shrill and 
wheezy bleats ; the balmy air is rich with the 
mingled scent of jasmine, orange peel, salt 
water and talcum powder. 

"All right, Emma," says Mr. Walnut, 



78 SUN HUNTING 

pocketing his seven cents and stretching his 
arms comfortably. "I think mebbe if I get 
a good sleep, I might catch me enough red 
snappers for a mess." 

Mrs. Walnut precedes him into the khaki 
tent which is attached to the side of their 
small automobile like a giant fungus, and as 
Mr. Walnut raises the flap to follow her, 
he looks back at Mr. and Mrs. Blister and 
bursts into hoarse laughter. "Say, Herm!'' 
he bawls pleasantly. Mr. Blister halts ex- 
pectantly. "'Back home," says Mr. Walnut, 
jerking his head over his left shoulder, 
"back home they're fixing the furnace and 
hoping the pipes won't freeze." 

"Haw, haw, haw!" replies Mr. Blister 
with evident enjoyment. 

"My gorry!" ejaculates Mr. Walnut by 
way of expressing combined disgust for and 
despair of the human race. And the tent- 
flap falls behind him as he joins Mrs. Wal- 
nut. 



CHAPTER III 

OF MIGRANTS AND MIGRATIONS — OF THE TRUE SUN- 
HUNTER AND HIS DESIRES — AND OF HIS UNI- 
FORM, AND HIS FLUENT ASSORTMENT 
OF EQUIPMENT 

The manner in which modern migrations 
are stimulated is pretty much the same all 
over the world. A resident of Poland, hav- 
ing no money and no job, borrows enough 
money from a relative in America to make 
the trip. Having made it, he writes back 
pityingly to his friends in Poland. 'Why," 
he asks in his letter, "should you stay in 
Poland ? It is a rotten place. Borrow some 
money and come over here quick. The 
place is full of rich suckers who will buy 
anything you show them. All of the 
Americans have got money. Come quickly 
before somebody gets all of it away from 
them." As soon as it becomes known that 
America can offer advantages which 

79 



8o SUN HUNTING 

Europe doesn't possess, the European is 
filled with a passionate desire to capture a 
few of them. Philosophers who have made 
a careful study of human motives and emo- 
tions have embalmed the philosophy of mi- 
grations in a few phrases, such as "distance 
lends enchantment," and "they all look good 
when they're far away." These phrases 
are true ; but the thing that lends the great- 
est amount of enchantment to a distant 
piece of real-estate is a letter from Cousin 
Walt or Friend Herbert saying, "You 
ought to see the fish we catch down here. 
A full course dinner only costs seventy-five 
cents. Don't miss this next year." 

The northern states, in the past few 
years, have developed a new type of migrant. 
Instead of being hot on the trail of any sort 
of coin, currency or legal tender, as is the 
modern European immigrant, and instead 
of being in search of political or religious 
freedom, as were many European immi- 
grants during the past century, the modern 



THE TIN-CANNERS 8i 

migrant is after warm weather during the 
winter months. He is a sun-hunter. He is 
sick of four months of snow and ice. He is 
heartily tired of cold feet, numb ears, red 
flannel underwear, rheumatism, stiff necks, 
coal bills, coughs, colds, influenza, draughts, 
mittens, ear-tabs, snow shovels, shaking 
down the furnace, carrying out ashes, and 
falling down on an icy sidewalk and sprain- 
ing his back. It gives him a prolonged pain 
to wear his overshoes and a muffler and to 
have to thaw out the radiator of his automo- 
bile every two or three days. The bane of 
his existence is sitting around the house for 
four months waiting for April to come 
along and unstiffen his joints. He wants 
sun and lots of it. If he must spend four 
months doing nothing, he prefers to spend 
it amid the Spanish moss and the palm 
trees, barkening dreamily to the cheerful 
twittering of the dicky-birds and to the 
stirring thuds of coconuts, oranges andg'rape- 
'fruit as they fall heavily to the ground. 



82 SUN HUNTING 

In the big hotels in Palm Beach, Miami, 
Ormond, Daytona, St. Augustine and other 
Florida resorts are the time-killers, with 
their jewel-lariats and their acres of white 
trousers: with their flask-trimmed tea- 
dances and their hard-boiled social aspira- 
tions and their refined gambling houses, 
and their trick whisky-canes. The sun, to 
the time-killers, is not of the utmost impor- 
tance. If they were unable to change their 
clothes several times a day they would feel 
ill-at-ease ; if they were unable to be charged 
a little matter of forty dollars a day for a 
double room and bath, they would feel that 
they were being slighted in some way; if 
they couldn't have the knowledge that they 
were inhaling the same air which was being 
inhaled by the leading millionaires and so- 
ciety pets, they would feel cheated. 

Not so the sun-hunter. The sun-hunter 
knows the value of a dollar. He usually 
knows the value of a nickel, also. It is said 
that before he relinquishes his hold on a 



THE TIN-CANNERS 83 

twenty-five-cent piece, he gives it a fare- 
well squeeze of such violence that the eagle 
on it frequently emits a strangled squawk of 
anguish. This statement, I believe, is a gross 
exaggeration. The fact remains, however, 
that one never finds the sun-hunter throw- 
ing his money around in the loose, spasmodic 
manner which always characterizes the 
genuine time-killer. And the sun-hunter 
wants just two things: sun and air. He 
knows nothing about Charley Schwab or 
Harry Payne Whitney or the Stotesburys, 
and he would take no interest whatever in 
them unless they got between him and the 
sun. 

He might entertain the notion of running 
over to Miami Beach to view the residence 
of Bob Hassler, who invented a Ford shock- 
absorber; but other plutocrats and social 
luminaries leave him cold. 

Clothes mean nothing in his life. The 
male sun-hunter is usually garbed in dark 
trousers which hang loosely on his legs like 



84 SUN HUNTING 

the trousers always inflicted on sculptured 
statesmen by sculptors of the Horace Gree- 
ley period. He may or he may not wear a 
coat, depending entirely on his whim of the 
moment; but he almost invariably affects 
the old-fashioned gallus, or suspender. He 
will be found in this garb on Sunday morn- 
ing, when fishing for yellowtails on the edge 
of a creek with a bamboo pole; he will be 
found in it on Wednesday afternoon, when 
visiting the movies ; and he will be found in 
it on Friday evening when engaged in an 
exciting game of euchre with a pair of 
brother and sister sun-hunters. He may 
change it, but there are few who are aware 
of it if he does. It is the sun-hunter's uni- 
form. 

The sun-hunters are not recruited from 
any one class of citizens. The natives of Flor- 
ida, with their unflagging determination to 
place everything in the most favorable light, 
tell you that they are bankers, merchants, 
doctors, lawyers and what-not. They'd 



THE TIN-CANNERS 85 

have you think that most of them are bank- 
ers. As a matter of fact, there are some 
bankers among them — and some burglars, 
too. The bulk of them are farmers; for a 
farmer can, if he wishes, arrange matters 
so that he has little or nothing to do during 
the winter months. Nexi to them come 
contractors, builders and carpenters. The 
sun-hunters are the people who can get 
away from home with the least amount of 
trouble; and among them one finds retired 
business men of all sorts, dairymen, doctors, 
bankers, lawyers and similar folk. 

Such is the modern American migrant, 
and Florida is the goal of his migration. As 
soon as the first snow begins to fall in the 
North, or when the earth has tightened up 
under a black frost, the sun-hunters prepare 
for their flight to the South. Great num- 
bers of them travel by automobile; and their 
automobiles are completely stocked with 
folding chairs, collapsible beds, accordeon- 
mattresses, knock-down tents, come-apart 



86 SUN HUNTING 

stoves, telescopic dishwashers and a score 
of dishpans, tables, dinner-sets, tin cups, 
water-buckets and toilet articles that fold 
up into one another and look like a bushel of 
scrap-tin. In addition to this, each automo- 
bile carries a large assortment of canned 
goods. There are canned goods under the 
seats, slung against the top, packed along 
the sides, tucked behind cushions and stacked 
along the floor. Some of the automobiles 
are so well stocked with canned things that 
they could make a dash for the Pole. And 
as one passes some of them on the road, they 
sound as though their owners were carrying 
a reserve supply of canned goods under the 
hood — loose. 



CHAPTER IV 

OF THE TIN-CAN TOURISTS OF THE WORLD — OF IM- 
MIGRANTS AND OTHER UNSUPERVISED VISITORS, 
NATIONAL AND LOCAL— OF CHEAP SKATES — AND 
OF THE REASON WHY TIN-CANNERS DO NOT 
ABOUND IN PALM BEACH 

It is due to the heavy weight of cans car- 
ried by these automobiles that the true, 
stamped-in-the-can sun-hunter is known to 
himself, to his friends and to his enemies as 
a tin-can tourist. He lives in more or less 
permanent settlements known as tin-can 
towns ; and his interests are safeguarded by 
a flourishing organization rejoicing in the 
impressive title of Tin-Can Tourists of the 
World. 

The badge of the Tin-Can Tourists of the 
World is a small white celluloid button with 
the letters T C T tastefully disposed on it 
in dark blue. The insignia of the order 
is a small soup-can mounted on the radiator 

87 



88 SUN HUNTING 

of the member's automobile. There is also 
a password which the members bawl at one 
another when they pass on the road; but this 
is one of the secrets of the fraternity that 
should not be profaned by publication. 

The Tin-Canners organized in 1919 at 
the Tampa Tin-Can Town and have held 
conventions there ever since. The present 
membership of the order is estimated by 
some of the most important officials or 
Khans of the Tin-Can Tourists to be in ex- 
cess of thirty thousand. 

Practically every Florida town and city, 
large and small, located inland or on the 
gulf or on the ocean, provides a tin-can town 
or a tin-can village for the tin-can tourists. 
Occasionally these towns are free and pro- 
vide not only all the comforts of home, but 
comforts that home never possessed for 
most of the tin-canners. The largest and 
most celebrated tin-can town is in De Soto 
Park, East Tampa, on the shore of Tampa 
Bay. Hundreds of automobiles are lined 




pq 
a 

a, 

H 

O 

V 

u 
o 




The apotheosis of tin-can comfort. 




i^mB&^B^^m^ii^ 



A tin-can camp between Palm Beach and Miami. 



THE TIN-CANNERS 89 

up side by side throughout the winter in De 
Soto Park. The camp, which is carefully 
regulated and policed by the municipal 
authorities, is free. A trolley line connects 
it with the business section of Tampa. In 
the center of the camp is a pavilion where 
entertainments are given. The camp has 
electric lights, running water, city sewerage, 
shower baths and an enormous hot-water 
tank. Tourists are permitted to send their 
children to the excellent schools on payment 
of fifty cents a week — which is too little. 

Oddly enough, fifty cents a week, or 
twenty-five dollars a year, is the amount 
that naturalization experts want to charge 
aliens for their schooling, but that Congress 
considers too high. It's not enough for 
American tin-canners ; but it's too much for 
aliens. How does Congress get that way? 

About the only things that aren't fur- 
nished for the tin-canners are free tele- 
phones, a free morning paper and free butler 
and valet service. 



90 SUN HUNTING 

During the 1 920-1 921 season there were 
great numbers of free tin-can camps 
throughout Florida; but Florida towns 
found, as the United States itself is begin- 
ning to find, that an open-handed and un- 
supervised welcome to any person who can 
scratch up enough money to take advantage 
of the welcome will bring nothing but annoy- 
ances, losses and misery in its train. The 
Tampa camp was a success because it was 
very carefully regulated and policed. Many 
of the other free camps, however, suddenly 
woke up to the truth of the old adage that 
people never appreciate the things that they 
get for nothing. This is, of course, the old 
problem of immigration reduced to a per- 
sonal basis. 

The United States talks for a century 
about the necessity of restricting immigra- 
tion and forcing aliens to pay for the priv- 
ilege of enjoying America's benefits, but in 
that hundred years, she does next to nothing. 
Florida towns, confronted with a mild edi- 



THE TIN-CANNERS 91 

tion of the same problem, take action over- 
night. 

What happened was this — and the same 
thing to a far greater degree and with far 
more evil and wide-spread results, is hap- 
pening to the United States and will keep on 
happening until immigration is rigidly re- 
stricted : 

Word began to go forth in the northern 
states that free camping-grounds were to 
be had in Florida towns and cities; that if 
one bought a second-hand flivver at the be- 
ginning of winter and beat his way to these 
camps, he could live more cheaply than he 
could live in the North, could afford to 
accept lower pay for his services than could 
the Florida natives, and could go back North 
in the spring with money in his pocket and 
sell his flivver for what he paid for it. 
These are almost exactly the same reasons 
that brought a million immigrants a year 
to America from Eastern and Southern 
Europe before the war. 



92 SUN HUNTING 

Florida has made it plain that she wants 
no more of these seasonal laborers who can't 
make a satisfactory living in their own com- 
munities. Most of them are so hard-boiled 
that a diamond-pointed drill is needed to 
penetrate their shells ; and most of them have 
as much regard for neatness, cleanliness and 
the rights of others as a Berkshire hog has 
for a potato-peel. Tin-can towns have begun 
to charge various prices for the privilege of 
staying in them — prices ranging from 
twenty-five cents a night to seventy-five 
cents a night, or from four dollars to ten 
dollars a month. Even the free towns won't 
admit residents who wish to go to work 
each day. They've got to be tourists, or 
devote themselves to taking the air. As a re- 
sult the seasonal laborers who went to Flor- 
ida for the 1921-1922 season were taking 
themselves homeward early in 1922 and hurl- 
ing many a deep, guttural, rough-neck curse 
at the state of Florida as they went. America 
would get very rapid and satisfactory action 



THE TIN-CANNERS 93 

on her immigration problem if her citizens 
could be brought in personal contact with 
its rottenness. 

These automobile hoboes are about as wel- 
come in Florida as a rattlesnake at a straw- 
berry festival. The Florida newspapers, 
usually very slow indeed to find any flaws 
in anybody or anything that has secured a 
foothold in the state, emit poignant shrieks 
of rage at the very thought of them. Early 
in 1922 a North Carolina paper, with the 
smugness which characterizes the utterances 
of a resort newspaper when it thinks it is 
administering a painful black eye to another 
resort, stepped forward with a tale to the 
effect that 1922 was seeing a great exodus 
from Florida of broke, hungry and disheart- 
ened tourists. Instantly the Florida papers 
threw their palpitating typewriters into the 
breach. 'The only Florida tourists beating 
it back to the North," declared the Tampa 
Tribune scornfully, "are the cut-rate, fly- 
by-night cheap-skates who have been com- 



94 SUN HUNTING 

ing to the state and preying off the public 
for the past many years. . . . The state 
has enough of its own honest labor to take 
care of without opening its doors to the 
floater who is here to take the bread out of 
his brother's mouth for less than the honest 
price. This winter Florida is taking care of 
its own out-of-work men and women. The 
riff-raff, the confidence men, the fakir, the 
wage cutter and the public mendicant all get 
the cold shoulder in Florida.'* 

The true sun-hunter and the tin-can tour- 
ist in good and accepted standing are re- 
ceived in most parts of the state with the 
same quiet welcome that would greet the 
arrival of a new citrus fruit. The big re- 
sorts like Palm Beach and Miami Beach 
don't welcome the tin-canners; but those re- 
sorts don't welcome any one who isn't able 
to spend at least fifty dollars a day on the 
merest essentials. And there are a number 
of young men employed by the leading Palm 
Beach hostelries who have nothinsr but un- 



THE TIN-CANNERS 95 

utterable contempt for the person who 
doesn't spend one hundred dollars a day 
while he is at Palm Beach. 

So far as I know, tin-canners have never 
attempted to wield their can-openers at 
Palm Beach or Miami Beach ; and it is highly 
probable that the regular Palm Beach set 
would give the tin-canners even more of a 
pain than the tin-canners would give the 
Palm Beach set. One can imagine the 
anguish on both sides if Mrs. J. Vander- 
plank Fritter of Park Avenue and a party 
of her prominent friends, should, after going 
in bathing in full evening dress, at one a. 
M., emerge in a still-potted state and run 
smack into a flivver loaded with that well- 
known tin-canner, Herman Blister, of Tack- 
hammer, Michigan, and his wife, sister, 
daughter and maiden aunt. The Fritter 
party might feel that its entire evening had 
been spoiled; but the Blister family would 
probably feel that a sinister cloud had de- 
scended on their entire season. 



CHAPTER V 

OF PORTABLE BUNGALOWS OF THE RHEUMATIC 

DAIRYMAN OF THE LITTLE OLE TRUCK OF 

SIMPLE PLEASURES AND LOW EXPENDITURES 

The tin-canner spends, for his winter of 
travel, about the same amount of money that 
a seasoned Palm Beach mixer frequently: 
spends in a couple of days. This isn't ex- 
aggeration, either. 

On the road between Miami and Palm 
Beach I encountered a commodious portable 
bungalow lumbering noisily along in the 
general direction of Palm Beach at the rate 
of about fifteen miles an hour. It filled the 
entire road, which was nine feet wide at 
that point There are many stretches of 
fine macadamized road in Florida which 
are exactly nine feet wide, so that when two 
machines pass each other, one or both of 
them has to take to the ditch. The reason 

96 



THE TIN-CANNERS 97 

for such peculiar road-building is supposed 
to be due to the fact that the road-engineers 
took a look at the surrounding country, 
decided that nobody would ever be willing 
to live in it, and figured that all traffic along 
the road would run in only one direction — 
north. They were mistaken, as people usually 
are about the development of Florida. 

At any rate, this portable bungalow filled 
the road, and it continued to fill the road 
until it found a good hard place beside the 
road that would permit it to get out of the 
way without tearing itself to pieces. It had 
a thermometer hanging beside its back door 
in an attractive manner, and three neigh- 
borly-looking people were sitting placidly on 
its glassed-in front porch. Across the base 
of the front porch, in large gold letters, was 
painted the owners' address, Bellevue, Ohio, 
from which fact one might suspect that the 
owners were not persons who were striving 
to hide their lights beneath a bushel, or who 
would shrink timidly from publicity. 



98 SUN HUNTING 

When questioned, the suspicion became a 
certainty. The owners of the portable 
bungalow proved to be typical tin-can tour- 
ists, equally ready to share with you their 
last tin of Norwegian sardines or Chicago 
baked beans in the Boston manner, or to 
furnish you with concise and intimate infor- 
mation concerning their own or their neigh- 
bors' business and family affairs from the 
panic of 1907 down to the present day. 

The owner of the portable bungalow was 
a dairyman near Sandusky, Ohio, who had 
grown tired of developing rheumatism, chil- 
blains and a grouch during the long winter 
months, and had decided three years before 
to spend the winter in Florida. He had 
enjoyed his first winter so much that he had 
persuaded a couple of friends to make the 
trip with him during the second winter ; and 
this winter there were two other couples in 
his party. The other four people traveled 
ahead in a little sedan ; while he and his wife 
and his eighteen-year-old son pounded along 



THE TIN-CANNERS 99 

behind in the ole truck. "Yessir, this house 
here is nothing but our ole delivery truck 
with a camping top put on it, and she cer- 
tainly is the greatest ole truck you ever 
saw! Why, my gracious, she'll just go 
through anything, this ole truck will. Why, 
coming through the Everglades this ole 
truck ran into ..." 

That is one of the hall-marks of the si- 
mon-pure tin-can tourist. No matter how 
battered and dilapidated his automobile may 
be, it has qualities which place it above all 
other cars — even above other and newer 
cars of the same make. It can extricate it- 
self from thicker mud and from deeper sand 
than other automobiles. Its feats of endur- 
ance are super-automotive. They verge — 
to hear the tin-canner tell it — on the mi- 
raculous. After the tin-canner has dwelt for 
some time on the almost-human intelligence 
of the little ole car, one thinks of it as stand- 
ing up on its hind wheels and honking with 
delight when its master says a kind word to it. 



lOO SUN HUNTING 

The dairyman's portable bungalow, which 
would slough its skin with the advent of 
spring and return to its less romantic duties 
of trucking milk, contained a portable stove, 
countless canned things, a fully equipped 
sink and kitchen cabinet, three hammocks, 
bedding for seven people, and a phonograph, 
to say nothing of numerous odds and ends 
like chairs, dishes, pans, suit-cases and 
what-not. 

In the party that used this portable 
bungalow as a base there were, as I have 
said, seven people. The seven of them had 
started from near Sandusky on the twenty- 
second of November, worked down to the 
west coast of Florida, lingering at the larger 
and better resorts, crossed over to the east 
coast and were slowly working back up 
through Palm Beach and Ormond. I met 
them on the eighth of February, so that they 
had been on the road for two months and a 
half. The expenses were borne equally by 
all of the travelers, except the dairyman's 



THE TIN-CANNERS loi 

son, who worked out his keep by doing the 
dirty work around the cars. Each of the 
other six chipped five dollars apiece into a 
general pool as money was needed. In the 
two and one-half months a grand total of 
five hundred and ten dollars had been 
chipped in; and this sum covered the total 
expenditures of the trip — gasoline for both 
automobiles; inner tubes, tires and repairs 
for both automobiles; street-car fares when 
needed; food for seven people; and movies 
whenever the spirit and the movies moved 
together. This meant an average of sev- 
enty-three dollars apiece for two and one- 
half months' travel in the sunny South, or 
almost exactly a dollar a day apiece. Such 
an expenditure contrasts startlingly with 
expenditures in the big resorts, where one 
week's expense for a man and his wife may 
easily cause a thousand-dollar bill to de- 
generate into a two-ounce package of chick- 
en-feed. 

The dairyman declared that to travel in 



I02 SUN HUNTING 

the way he was traveling cost him about 
one-third as much as it would have cost him 
to travel to Florida in trains and to live at 
hotels and boarding-houses. From this 
statement it can be seen that one doesn't 
necessarily have to be a millionaire in order 
to spend a winter in Florida. 



CHAPTER VI 

OF MRS. JARLEY, THE ORIGINAL TIN-CANNER OF 

THE TWO SCHOOLS OF TIN-CAN THOUGHT — OF THE 

HARD-BOILED BACHELOR WITH THE CONDENSED 

OUTFIT — AND OF FOLK WHO RIDE ON THE 

BACKS OF THEIR NECKS 

Mr. Charles Dickens, in The Old Cu- 
riosity Shop, described the original luxurious 
tin-canning vehicle; but Dickens knew the 
contraption as a caravan. And instead of 
being motor-driven, it was, of course, horse- 
drawn. The original tin-can tourist appears 
to have been Mrs. Jarley, proprietress of 
Jarley's Waxwork, who ''rode in a smart 
little house upon wheels, with white dimity 
curtains festooning the windows, and win- 
dow shutters of green picked out with panels 
of a staring red, in which happily contrasted 
colors the whole concern shone brilliant. 
. . . One-half of it ., . . was carpeted, 
and so partitioned off at the further end as 
to accommodate a sleeping-place, constructed 
103 



104 SUN HUNTING 

after the fashion of a berth on board ship, 
which was shaded, Hke the Httle windows, 
with fair white curtains, and looked com- 
fortable enough, though by what kind of 
gymnastic exercise the lady of the caravan 
ever contrived to get into it, was an unfath- 
omable mystery. The other half served for 
a kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove 
whose small chimney passed through the 
room. It held also a closet or larder, several 
chests, a great pitcher of water, and a few 
cooking utensils and articles of crockery." 

Heated discussions arise among the tin- 
canners as to the proper size of a camping 
outfit. The man with a portable bungalow 
scorns the man who jams all his belongings 
into a small space as being an old woman 
and a tight-wad; while the man who packs 
his camping outfit into the small machine 
views the portable bungalow owner with the 
utmost contempt as being inefficient, spoiled 
by luxury, a road hog and a slave to his 
belongings. 



THE TIN-CANNERS 105 

In Lemon City, a suburb of Miami, I 
found a tin-canner whose tin-canning outfit 
was probably the extreme opposite of the 
portable bungalow outfit. His home was 
Chicago, and since early autumn he had 
jounced from Chicago down to Texas, 
around the eastern side of the Gulf of 
Mexico, down the west coast of Florida and 
up the east coast. 

He was a hard-boiled bachelor of the sort 
who announces loudly that he doesn't pro- 
pose to bother anybody and that he doesn't 
want anybody to bother him. His means of 
locomotion was a small Ford runabout with 
a box-like contraption behind the seat similar 
to that used by salesmen who carry their 
samples around with them. Nothing was 
strapped to the sides or the running boards 
of the machine ; it was an ordinary runabout 
with the top up and with an inconspicuous 
box attached behind. Into this box, which a 
carpenter had built for him for a matter of 
seven dollars, the tin-canner had packed 



io6 SUN HUNTING 

everything that he needed for a five months' 
camping trip. He had lain awake at night 
for years doping out exactly where he was 
going to carry the butter and how he could 
fry the eggs with the least commotion; and 
the final result was a masterpiece of com- 
pactness — or such compactness that if any 
one but the inventor had tried to repack the 
camping outfit, he might have sweated over 
the problem for two hours and still had 
jenough left over to fill a freight car. 

iThe front of the box came off and proved 
to be shelves packed with tin cans and other 
matters pertaining to the kitchen. A khaki 
top and sides pulled out of the top of the 
box, extending straight backward from the 
machine top, and were held in place by col- 
lapsible uprights. The seat of the machine, 
laid along the top of his kitchen shelves, 
formed his bed ; and on this was placed what 
he called a shoulder-and-hip mattress. All a 
person needed, he explained, was a mattress 
that made a comfortable resting-place for 



THE TIN-CANNERS 107 

his hips and shoulders: it made no differ- 
ence what became of his legs. His cooking 
utensils, including a collapsible stove no big- 
ger than a fair-sized inkwell, came out of a 
small tin suit-case. He had every move 
planned out in detail. 

*ln the morning," he explained, fondling 
his outfit with the proud and gentle hands of 
a parent, "I get up and eat one of these indi- 
vidual packages of breakfast food. While 
Fm doing that the water is boiling for my 
coffee, and as soon as the coffee is done, I 
put on my frying pan with bacon and eggs 
in it. I use two paper napkins for my table- 
cloth. When I have finished breakfast, I 
put the eggshells in the breakfast-food box, 
wipe out the frying-pan with the napkins, 
put them into the box on top of the egg- 
shells, and touch a match to the box. That 
cleans everything up." He knew exactly 
how, when and where he was going to do 
everything, and he was delighted to knock 
off a couple of days to explain any or all of 



io8 SUN HUNTING 

his well-ordered regimen to any one who 
wanted to know about it. He would even 
deign to explain it as fully as possible to 
some who didn't want to know about it. 
One of his greatest pleasures was to unpack 
and pack the tin suit-case that contained his 
kitchen utensils. It seemed impossible that 
any human agency could get all of them into 
the space at his disposal, but he could do it 
almost every time. Occasionally he would 
find himself with a frying-pan left over 
when the packing was finished ; but instead 
of getting excited he would unpack calmly 
and coolly and fit the things together with a 
practised hand until there was nothing left 
over. He had a collapsible chair that dropped 
into the side pocket of his coat and took up 
less space than a note-book. He had a 
diminutive double-ended ice-cream freezer. 
This was his ice-chest. Butter went in one 
end and milk or cream in the other. The 
biggest day in the life of this genius will, I 
believe, be when he discovers a collapsible 



THE TIN-CANNERS 109 

frying pan that will fold into a one-pound 
bacon box. 

The ordinary tin-canner, unlike these two 
extreme examples, is content with an ordi- 
nary, small touring car, which, when in mo- 
tion, has a part of his camping outfit at- 
tached to every exposed part of his machine. 
The tent and a couple of suit-cases are at- 
tached to one running board ; mattresses and 
blankets are attached to the other; cases of 
canned goods, kitchen utensils and other 
odds and ends are fixed to the rear or con- 
cealed beneath a false floor in the tonneau. 
The false floor is frequently carried to such 
an extreme that the occupants of the automo- 
bile convey the impression of riding around 
the world on the backs of their necks. When 
the ordinary tin-canners break out their 
camping outfit, the tent extends out at right 
angles from the side door of the car, so that 
the occupants of the tent can use the car as a 
combinationlavatory,sitting-rooni,chiffonier, 
clothes closet, pantry and safe-deposit vault. 



CHAPTER VII 

OF THE MIGRANT FROM MARION OF HIS FEARS OF 

LAND AT A NICKEL AN ACRE OF SAND FLEAS 

AND SAND SPURS OF LONELINESS AND HONEY- 

MOONERS — ^AND OF THE DOCTOR WHO WAS 
RUN TO DEATH 

I CONFERRED With a itiild-spoken tin-canner 
at a Miami tin-can camp one hot February 
afternoon as to tin-canning in general. His 
wife, who was a capable and keen-witted 
lady in a blue gingham dress, sat with us and 
dug the soft substance out of tiny pine 
cones, her idea being to sandpaper them and 
varnish them at a later date, and make them 
into fascinating strings of beads. This is 
one of the most popular diversions among 
lady tin-canners — almost as popular as is 
horseshoe pitching among the male tin-can- 
ners. 

The tin-canner was a non-committal corn 
farmer from the vicinity of that newly- 

IIO 



THE TIN-CANNERS 1 1 1 

famous Ohio town, Marion. Careful 
thought on his part, assisted by frequent 
promptings from his wife, brought out the 
following information: He had broken 
away from the farm for the winter because 
he preferred sitting around where it was 
comfortably warm to sitting around where 
it was uncomfortably cold. He wasn't par- 
ticularly struck with Florida land, but he 
liked the Florida air. Looking at Florida 
land with the eye of an Ohio farmer, he felt 
that he wouldn't particularly care to pay 
much more than a nickel an acre for most 
of it. He met up with a lot of Michigan 
and Ohio farmers along the road, and they 
felt the same way about it. Still, it was 
kind of restful and soothing to look at, and 
the sun and the air more than made up for 
the drawbacks of the land. The sun was 
nicer just to sit in than the Ohio sun, and 
there was more of it. This Florida sun 
made a person feel kind of trifling — trifling 
being southern and mid-western slang for 



112 SUN HUNTING 

lazy. He wouldn't want any Florida people 
to hear him say that some of the land looked 
worthless, because they would probably pass 
an act through the legislature forbidding him 
to come back into the state again — and he 
wouldn't like that because it was a real 
pleasant place to come back to — in the win- 
ter. Besides, you couldn't tell much about 
this Florida land from looking at it. Some- 
thing that was a swamp one year would be 
nice solid land the next year and selling for 
fifty dollars a front foot. These Florida 
people were real touchy people and you had 
to be mighty careful what you said when 
they were around. The sand flies pricked 
holes in him every afternoon, but he pre- 
ferred not to mention it when any Florida 
people were around for fear they would 
say he was a California man that had been 
paid to come over and cast slurs on Florida's 
fair name. And for the same reason he dis- 
liked to mention the sand fleas that came 
up out of the sand around sun-down and 



THE TIN-CANNERS 113 

nipped him all over the legs, or of the sand 
spurs that caught in the trousers and felt as 
though several people were prodding him 
with ice-picks. 

There was one bad feature connected with 
tin-canning, and that was loneliness. There 
were a lot of honeymooners among the tin- 
canners, and they were about the only ones 
who didn't seem to get lonely. Unless you 
had a couple of friends to travel with, or 
were honeymooners, you were apt to get 
lonely and homesick, and go back where it 
was cold, and be sore at yourself for going 
back. 

They were traveling with a doctor and 
his wife from back home. The doctor was 
the only doctor in the neighborhood and he 
had been just run to death. Folks wouldn't 
let him alone. He was just run to death. 
Somebody was getting sick every minute, 
and they'd call him up at all hours of the 
day and night and just run him to death. 
For years he'd been planning to take a vaca- 



114 SUN HUNTING 

tion and rest up, but they ran him so he 
couldn't. So finally when he heard that 
they were going to Florida, he just up and 
went. Oh, he was run to death, but a few 
weeks in Florida had done him a world of 
good. No, he didn't know how his former 
patients were getting along. Probably they 
were all right. Probably there was some 
young college feller looking out for them. 
There generally was in a case like that. He 
didn't know. Things like that didn't worry 
you much when you struck Florida and 
began to sit out in the sun. 



CHAPTER VIII 

OF THE MARVELOUS SITTING ABILITY OF THE TIN- 
CANNERS — OF THE PARKS IN WHICH THEY SIT — 
OF THE HORSESHOE BUGS AND THE CHECKER AND 
DOMINO BEETLES OF THE DELICATE MOVE- 
MENTS OF A CELEBRATED HORSESHOE TOSSER 
— ^AND OF THE INTERNATIONAL HORSE- 
SHOE CLUB 

And so v^e return to the great craving of 
the sun-hunters: to sit in the sun and take 
the air. Golf is a matter of v^hich they 
know little ; tennis is regarded as a game for 
muscleless smart Alecks; polo might be a 
sort of dog or a movie actor — they're 
not quite sure about it; sea-bathing is 
a diversion in v^hich they rarely indulge. 
But they are remarkable sitters. Given a 
bench in the sun, they can outsit a trained 
athlete or the United States Senate. 

All of the tov^ns and cities and large tin- 
can camps of Florida cater to the sun-hunt- 
ers by setting apart a sunny park where they 

115 



Ii6 SUN HUNTING 

can gather and commune silently or mono- 
syllabically with one another, chew tobacco, 
discuss fertilizers, cuss the administration 
and indulge in the games to which they are 
addicted. Some of the sun-hunters who 
wear the benches shiny in these parks are 
tin-canners; and some are seasonal sun- 
hunters who have left their farms and their 
businesses in the North and hired a bunga- 
low in Florida for two hundred or four hun- 
dred or eight hundred or one thousand dol- 
lars a season; and some are professional 
sun-hunters from the North who have made 
barely enough money to last them the rest 
of their lives unless the country goes Bol- 
shevik or unless Congress taxes their sav- 
ings out of existence and who have bought 
homes for themselves in Florida ; and a very 
few are rebellious husbands from the big 
hotels who have sneaked away from the 
money-perfumed atmosphere of the time- 
killers and incurred their wives' disgust and 
loathing by mingling with the rough-necks. 



THE TIN-CANNERS 117 

Take, for example. Royal Palm Park at 
Miami. It is larger than some of the Flor- 
ida parks for sun-hunters; but the people 
who use it are no different from those who 
use similar parks all over Florida. 

On one side of the park is Biscayne Bay, 
with ginger-breadish house-boats and gleam- 
ing steam yachts and broad-winged flying 
boats crowded along the shore. On another 
side is Miami's principal business street, 
lined with modern office buildings and up- 
to-the-minute haberdasheries and modistes 
and drug-stores and real-estate offices and 
hotels and soft-drink emporiums and parked 
automobiles and bustling shoppers. 

In the park itself, beneath the softly rus- 
tling palms, an audience of silent sun-hunt- 
ers, sprawled on benches which surround 
the edges, gaze intently at the long double 
row of horseshoe pitchers and at a score of 
long tables crowded with men who are 
brooding over obviously important matters. 
The men at the tables are the skilled checker. 



u8 SUN HUNTING 

chess and domino players of the tin-can 
camps and the sun-hunters' colonies. At 
one table one afternoon I recognized a doc- 
tor who had cured my childish ailments in 
Maine many years ago. Opposite him was a 
cattleman from Iowa. Beside him was a 
crippled begger and panhandler who owned 
no home at all ; and busily playing checkers 
with the panhandler was a prosperous-look- 
ing small-town banker from Illinois. 

Checker and domino tournaments of ter- 
rifying ferocity take place at frequent inter- 
vals. The champion checker player of 
Miami issues a challenge to the champion 
checker player of West Palm Beach, and 
the outcome is awaited with breathless inter- 
est. It is not unusual for individuals to 
wager as much as fifty cents on the result. 

For hair-raising excitement and action 
so thrilling that it frequently causes hard- 
ened sun-hunting onlookers to swallow their 
chews, one must turn to the horseshoe 
pitchers. Horseshoe pitching is the repre- 




a. 
B 

H 



THE TIN-CANNERS 119 

sentative sport of the tin-canner and the 
sun-hunter, just as the representative sport 
of the British working man is drinking Bur- 
ton's and just as the representative sport of 
certain African tribes is wearing rings in 
their noses. 

Just as an Englishman is unable to see 
anything in baseball, and just as most 
Americans yawn heartily at the mere men- 
tion of cricket, so is the ordinary passer-by 
unable to detect the charm in horseshoe 
pitching. He sees a long row of men toss- 
ing horseshoes at iron stakes and another 
long row of men digging the horseshoes out 
of the dirt and tossing them back at other 
stakes. But the sun-hunters get out imme- 
diately after breakfast and pitch all day with 
feverish intensity and passionate concentra- 
tion, only quitting when the sun goes down 
behind the palms in a golden haze. 

Some of the horseshoe experts carry 
their private horseshoes with them in 
leather bags, and it is not unusual for an 



120 SUN HUNTING 

aspiring horseshoe tosser to seek out tfie 
experts and pay handsomely for copies of 
the instruments with which they won to 
fame and high position. Thus it may be 
seen how among horseshoe tossers, as well 
as among golfers, ballplayers and others 
who should know better, the delusion per- 
sists that a workman may attain perfection 
through his tools instead of through him- 
self. 

The more skilful tossers carry with them 
all the appliances of their avocation — tape 
measures with which to measure the dis- 
tance of the shoes from the stake; calipers 
to measure their distance from one another ; 
chalk with which to keep score; collapsible 
rakes to smooth out the tumbled dirt around 
the stakes. The delicate movements of a 
celebrated tosser as he hitches up his gal- 
luses, spits on his right hand and tests his 
muscles by sinking to a semi-squatting posi- 
tion and rising upright again, are watched 
with the keenest interest by large crowds of 



THE TIN-CANNERS 121 

sun-hunters. When a horseshoe makes a 
particularly noteworthy flight, a fusillade of 
applausive spitting splashes on the sun- 
baked ground. 

There is, of conrse, an International 
Horseshoe Club. It is too important an or- 
ganization to be demeaned with a merely 
local name, such as the Horseshoe Club of 
America. Then there are local chapters 
that indulge in tournaments at which feel- 
ing runs high. At West Palm Beach, when 
I was there, a new pitch was being prepared 
for the big impending tournament with Lake 
Worth. An international polo match may 
get more publicity, but there's more quiet 
bitterness over a horseshoe tournament — 
much more. Especially in Florida. 

Those who weary of dominoes, checkers, 
chess and horseshoe pitching are at liberty 
to cut a bamboo pole and sit in the sun be- 
side one of the countless rivers, streams and 
inlets that dent the Florida coast. These 
waters are full of trout, bass, red snapper, 



122 SUN HUNTING 

yellowtails, pompano, grunts — silvery and 
delicious fish so-called because of their 
noisy and peevish growls and grunts of pro- 
test v^hen removed from the water — and 
many other fish whose eating and fighting 
qualities would have caused Izaak Walton 
to swoon with delight. 

If s hard to believe that the North, every 
winter, is full of people who hate northern 
winters, and of folk who don't know what 
to do with themselves. If they don't know 
enough to become sun-hunters, they deserve 
to suffer. 



BOOK THREE 

TROPICAL GROWTH 



CHAPTER I 

OF THE ENTHUSIASM OF ALL GROWING THINGS IN" 

FLORIDA OF PAW-PAWS AND PROSPECTUSES AND 

PERFECT THIRTY-FOURS OF FIENDS IN HUMAN 

SHAPE — AND OF THE WATCHFULNESS OF THE 
NATIVES FOR INSULTS 

Everything grows in Florida. That is to 
say, everything grows in Florida that Flor- 
ida people want to grow. That is Florida's 
specialty: growing. Occasionally a few 
things get out of hand and indulge in some 
over-enthusiastic growing when Florida 
people wish that they wouldn't ; but for the 
most part Florida is proud of the remark- 
able growths that take place within her 
boundaries. This is particularly true of 
southern Florida. The superlatives as welt 
as the fish grow to surprising proportions: 
so do the real-estate advertisements and the 
avocados. The sun is larger and warmer 
than in other parts of America; and the 

125 



126 SUN HUNTING 

sky — unless the leading Florida author- 
ities are mistaken in their observations — is 
higher and bluer than elsewhere. 

There are only three things that southern 
Florida has never made any effort to grow. 
These are mountains, snow-storms and 
earthquakes. If there were any particular 
reason for her to grow any of these things, 
she could probably arrange to pump up a 
few square miles of ocean floor and pile the 
sand up into a mountain that would look 
like a blood relative — say a grandson — of 
Fujiyama; and she could unquestionably 
find a way to raise artificial snow-storms 
that would make Oregon jealous, and earth- 
quakes that would shake out a person's eye- 
teeth. Since there isn't any reason for 
them, she specializes on more useful things 
like paw-paws and prospectuses and perfect 
thirty-four bathing-girls and what-not, and 
secures some startling results. 

Take Miami, for example. Before taking 
it, one should understand that there is grave. 



TROPICAL GROWTH 127 

danger in taking any particular city in Flor- 
ida to the exclusion of any other city, because 
all the untaken cities immediately feel 
slighted and begin to thirst for the heart's 
blood of the one who did the taking. 

Each Florida city or resort is violently 
jealous of every other resort or city. The 
residents of Palm Beach speak sneeringly of 
Miami as being a bit plebeian. The resi- 
dents of Miami speak compassionately of 
Palm Beach, as young and pretty girls 
speak of decaying beauty. St. Petersburg 
and Tampa and Miami have little of a favor- 
able nature to say concerning one another. 
They only unite to resist attacks from re- 
sorts outside the state, or to say a few tart 
words about California. 

Every little while some fiend in human 
shape prints a piece in a South Carolina or 
North Carolina or Georgia paper falsely 
accusing a Florida city of harboring a few 
cases of typhoid or scarlet fever, or of being 
too chilly for winter bathing. Instantly the 



128 SUN HUNTING 

Florida people rise to defend the state's fair 
name; and the low, searing curses that are 
hurled against the foul detractor are warm 
enough to singe a hog. 

Every little while, too, Florida gets a 
chance to slip a knife into her hated resort 
rival, California; and when the chance 
occurs, the air is filled with a deadly swish- 
ing sound, due to the violence with which the 
knife is inserted. 

A snow-storm in California causes Flor- 
ida newspapers to spread loud and exultant 
head-lines entirely across their front pages, 
declaring excitedly: NO LIVES LOST IN 
CALIFORNIA BLIZZARD. This is the 
negation of news everywhere except in 
Florida; but Florida smacks her lips over it 
with the keenest delight. She emphasizes 
the blizzard's severity by shrieking that no 
lives were lost, thus implying that hundreds 
— nay, thousands — might have been lost 
save for the merest chance. She is so 
anxious to have tourists realize that she is 



TROPICAL GROWTH 129 

the queen of winter resorts that she is over- 
joyed when another resort-state is cursed 
with a phase of Nature that tends to dis- 
courage tourists. 

There is another grave danger in taking 
any Florida city as an example. The natives 
of Florida winter resorts are constantly on 
the qui vive for slights and insults. They 
are so much on the qui vive in this respect 
that there is scarcely room for any one else 
on it. They occupy practically the entire 
qui vive. 



CHAPTER II 

OP HOTEL RATES — OF MOSQUITOES — AND OF THE 

OUTCRY AGAINST THE SHIPPING BOARD FOR 

DARING TO MENTION EUROPE 

One can never tell beforehand what 
statements, phrases, remarks, words or in- 
flections — or lack of these things — ^the 
staunch Floridans will regard as slighting 
or insulting. Sometimes they become just 
as fretful if you don't say them as they do 
if you do say them. 

There is the matter of hotel rates, for 
example: if you tell what they are at the 
best hotels, all Florida reviles you for fright- 
ening tourists away. If you tell what they 
are at the cheaper hotels, the owners and 
officials of the best hotels curse you bitterly 
for representing Florida as a cheap place. 
Evidently they want you to lie about the 
hotel rates; but if you do, they will call you 
a liar. 

130 



TROPICAL GROWTH 131 

Then there is the little matter of mosqui- 
toes. Usually there are not mosquitoes 
along the Florida coastline between the 
months of November and March, inclusive, 
because the prevailing winds drive them 
inland. Occasionally, however, the wind 
shifts or the atmosphere is unduly affected 
by the hemisphere or something technical; 
and the tough, leathery, muscular, hungry 
Florida mosquitoes are blown down to the 
shore, where they sink their dagger-like 
beaks into the soft white flesh of the north- 
ern tourists. 

It is only occasionally, it should be under- 
stood, that such a catastrophe occurs. Oc- 
casionally at Palm Beach one is told with 
hoarse jeering laughter that there are mos- 
quitoes at Miami; but when one gets to 
Miami he finds no mosquitoes, and is told 
with cold emphasis that there aren't any in 
Miami — but that there are many of them at 
Palm Beach. And so it goes. If one doesn't 
mention the Palm Beach mosquitoes, one 



132 SUN HUNTING 

runs the risk of being viewed with abhor- 
rence by the Miami folk; and if one doesn't 
mention the Miami mosquitoes, one is apt 
to be regarded with loathing by the Palm 
Beach boosters. And if one goes back 
North and makes any mention whatever of 
mosquitoes in Florida, he is more than likely 
to be enthusiastically damned by every Flor- 
idan as a vile prevaricator. 

Not long ago the Shipping Board in its 
advertisements emphasized the delights of 
winter travel in Europe. Instantly the 
watchful Floridans leaped to their feet with 
ear-piercing shrieks of protest. A govern- 
ment bureau, they screamed, was taking the 
money of Florida taxpayers to advertise 
winter attractions in competition with their 
own. The entire state had never been so 
insulted in its life; and the wrathful cries 
which went forth traveled all the way to 
Washington and knocked unsightly chips 
from many of the capital's ivory domes. As 
a result, the Shipping Board promised to 



TROPICAL GROWTH 133 

change its policy, and the touchy Floridans 
became calmer— though it is difficult for the 
outsider to see how the Shipping Board can 
advertise at all in the winter without enter- 
ing into competition with Florida. But you 
never can tell. You never can tell. It is 
about as safe to write about Florida as it 
would be to kick carelessly at the nubbins 
on a floating mine. 



CHAPTER III 

OF PALM TREES — OF VARIETIES OF FISH — AND OF 
FRUIT AND LIARS AND BARON MUNCHAUSEN 

Let us return to the matter of growth 
in southern Florida. Everything, as has 
been said, groves there. There are twenty- 
nine varieties of palm trees; and one can 
spend an entire week doing nothing but 
check up palm trees. According to official 
count there are two hundred and seventy- 
five different varieties of fish in southern 
Florida waters — or there were toward the 
middle of last February. A new variety is 
discovered every week. Unofficial counters 
say that there are more than seven hundred 
varieties. The unofficial ones are probably 
nearer right than the official ones. There 
are so many different varieties of fruit that 
if one attempted to eat every variety in one 
day, he would unquestionably burst with a 

134 



TROPICAL GROWTH 135 

loud majority report. A partial list of 
fruits which are being successfully raised 
in Florida's southernmost county, provided 
by a man with a poor memory, contains 
avocado — or alligator pear, custard apple, 
mammea apple, Jamaica apple, rose apple, 
Bugamot, citron, banana, Barbadoes cherry, 
chermoyas, cecropia, Surinam cherry, 'ca- 
rissa, Jackfruit, lime, lemon, loquat, various 
sorts of mangoes, fifty-seven different 
varieties of orange, a number of crosses 
between oranges and other things, grape- 
fruit, eggfruit, dates, olives, monsterosa 
deliciosa, papaya, pomegranate, Japanese 
persimmon, sour sop, sapote, sapodillo, straw- 
berry, tomato. If a Floridan has plenty of 
time at his disposal, he can think up twenty 
or thirty more fruits that are fruiting con- 
stantly and energetically in southern Florida. 
One of the unfortunate features of dis- 
cussing southern Florida lies in the fact that 
if one isn't careful, his non-Florida or anti- 
Florida hearers will suspect him of having 



136 SUN HUNTING 

taken money to advertise the state. They 
will, in short, suspect him of exaggeration 
when he carelessly mentions the ever-sunny 
skies and the perfect-thirty-four bathing 
girls and the amazing growths. The whole 
subject is fraught with risks. Baron Mun- 
chausen would never have been able to 
work up a reputation as a liar in southern 
Florida, because his lies weren't much more 
startling than the things that happen there 
every day. But if the Baron had sand- 
wiched a few Florida facts among his lies 
and had tried them out on his neighbor^ 
some evening after his second gallon of 
Dortmunder beer, they would have slapped 
one another on the back and rolled around 
in their chairs with tears of mirth pouring- 
down their cheeks, and assured one another 
between their spasmodic gasps and groans 
of merriment that there never would be 
anybody in the world who would be able to 
tell such downright ridiculous, preposterous, 
side-splitting, hair-raising lies as the Baron. 



CHAPTER IV 

OF MIAMI AND OF TROPICAL GROWTH — OF THE 

GROWING OF A SHINGLE INTO A BUNGALOW — OF 

THE POPULATION OF MIAMI IN 1980 — AND 

OF THE PRONUNCIATION OF MIAMI 

Take Miami, for example. In 1896 
Miami consisted of two small dwellings and 
a storehouse. Sometimes as many as ten 
Seminole Indians would be seen in the vi- 
cinity of these buildings at one time, and 
the occupants of the dwellings would 
scarcely be able to sleep that night because 
of their excitement at seeing such a throng 
of people. 

In 19 10, Miami had a population of 5,471. 
In 1920 there were about 30,000 people liv- 
ing there. In 1922 there were 40,000. 
That's the way things go in Florida. Once 
let a thing get a foothold, and it grows so 
rapidly that the general effect is more that 
of an explosion than a growth. 

^Z7 



138 SUN HUNTING 

Grass grows with such enthusiasm in 
Miami that one can't merely plant seed and 
let it grow. If one did that the grass would 
come in so thick that it would choke itself. 
What one does is to plant the seed and then, 
when the seed has sprouted, transplant the 
spears of grass so that they're six inches 
apart. 

Tree culture is very simple. A small piece 
of wood the size of a toothpick is stuck in 
moist sand. At the end of four years the 
toothpick has grown into a hibiscus bush 
twenty feet high and twenty feet across. 
The publisher of the leading Miami paper 
declares that in some sections of the city 
the soil is so fertile that if a shingle is 
planted in it before sun-up, it will grow into 
a fully equipped bungalow by nightfall. 
Other fish stories will be taken up in 
another place. 

Miami surges ahead so rapidly that none 
of its citizens dares to stand still for a mo- 
ment in order to watch it grow for fear that 




Photograph byW.A. Fhhhaugh 
One of Miami's many beautiful public schools. 




Pholograph hyW.A. Fishhaugh 

Private yachts and house-boats tied up at the foot of Miami's principal 
shopping street. 



TROPICAL GROWTH 139 

he'll be left so far behind that he'll never 
catch up. If he makes a prediction, he 
makes a running prediction; never a stand- 
ing prediction. If he sells a piece of land — 
atid it's as natural for a Miami citizen to sell 
a piece of land as it is for him to have coffee 
for breakfast — he is very likely to name a 
price that the land will reach to-morrow in- 
stead of the price that it has reached to-day. 
He is always moving ahead of the city. 

The population of Miami has increased 
four hundred and forty per cent, in the last 
ten years. Therefore the Miami people 
figure that it will easily increase another 
four hundred and forty per cent, in the next 
ten years. They claim that the city's popu- 
lation in 1925 will be one hundred thousand, 
and that in 1930 it will be two hundred thou- 
sand. Proceeding at that rate, its popula- 
tion in 1950 will be five million; and by 
1980 practically every one in North America 
will be pushing and crowding in his effort 
to squeeze into the city. 



140 SUN HUNTING 

It is, of course, quite obvious to the effete 
and blase northerner that the claims made 
by the Miami folk show that there are some 
screws loose on their claimers. The Miami 
people, however, say that the northern 
people don't know how to adjust their views 
to a rapidly growing city — that they stand 
still to look at it; and that while they are 
looking, the city grows out of focus. They 
prove their theory by the following 
anecdote : 

A short time ago the telephone company 
sent down estimators to look at Miami and 
estimate its population in another ten years, 
in order that the company might be able to 
install the proper-sized telephone switch- 
board. The estimators looked, made careful 
estimates, and reported that the population 
would be one hundred thousand in ten 
years' time. The telephone company burst 
into loud howls of derision. "You're 
crazy!'' it cried to the estimators. "Who 
ever told you that you could estimate? 



TROPICAL GROWTH 141 

Somebody must be paying you to boost the 
place! Get out of the way and let us send 
down some regular estimators!" So the 
company sent down some new estimators; 
and these estimators in turn looked over the 
ground and did some careful estimating. 
They then returned and reported that the 
population in ten years' time would be one 
hundred and twenty thousand. The tele- 
phone company, without more ado, installed 
a switchboard based on that estimate. But 
the Miami people claim that the estimators 
were making stationary estimates, and that 
the difference between the estimates of the 
first and the second estimators was merely 
due to the fact that the city had moved for- 
ward between their visits. If they had 
known how to place themselves en rapport^ 
so to speak, with the city and move forward 
with it, both of them would have estimated 
that the population would be two hundred 
thousand in ten years' time. 

At any rate, the real-estate operations in 



142 SUN HUNTING 

Miami — and the word Miami, by the way, 
is pronounced My-amma by every one 
except the uncultured folk who insist on pro- 
nouncing it as spelled — the real-estate opera- 
tions in Miami are on a scale that will pro- 
vide building lots for twenty million people 
by 1930. 



CHAPTER V 

OF REAL-ESTATE DEALERS OF THE LARGE HANDSOME 

SALESMEN OF NOISY AUCTIONS — OF ABSOLUTE 

AND UNABSOLUTE AUCTIONS AND OF 

PRICES FOR EVERY POCKETBOOK 

s 

The exact number of real-estate dealers 
in Miami is not known. Practically every 
one over eighteen years of age dabbles in 
real-estate at one time or another. Almost 
every one owns a lot somewhere that he is 
anxious to get rid of, although it is unani- 
mously admitted by the owners that every 
lot in Miami will double in value in a year's 
time. Almost every other doorway along 
Miami's crowded streets shelters a real- 
estate firm; and whole coveys of real-estate 
firms are frequently sheltered in buildings 
that would be considered small by a family 
of three people. 

Some of the firms keep impressive-look- 
ing salesmen standing just outside of the 

143 



144 SUN HUNTING 

building in which the firms do business. 
These salesmen are large, handsome men 
for the most part, strikingly dressed in white 
trousers, pearl gray sack coats, white shoes, 
white belts, white neckties and straw hats 
tilted knowingly toward the right ear. If 
one stops for a moment to admire a window 
display which shows automobiles, diamonds 
and tax-exempt bonds sprouting from the 
super-fertile soil of land that is on sale 
within at one thousand dollars an acre, one 
of the salesmen is very apt to come up behind 
him and tempt him with honeyed words. It 
is almost futile to struggle against these 
salesmen. Unless one possesses an iron 
will, he will weakly permit himself to be 
coaxed within the portals of the office, 
where he will spend the better part of an 
hour looking at meaningless maps and hear- 
ing large sums of money mentioned with 
the utmost carelessness and disrespect. 

Other real-estate firms constantly carry 
on selling campaigns that strongly resemble 



TROPICAL GROWTH 145 

— in noise, at least — the return of the Twen- 
ty-seventh Division from the War. They re- 
sort to brass bands, numbers of sight-seeing 
automobiles, silver-tongued orators to cajole 
the crowd, and advertisements that inflame 
the acquisitive spirit of every beholder. 
When newcomers see a monster parade of 
automobiles, headed by a blaring band, 
swinging through the streets of Miami, 
they usually think, in their innocence, that 
a three-ring circus has come to town. As a 
matter of fact, it is only the firm of Yam- 
mer & Yawp taking a mob of prospects out 
to its daily auction sale of lots at Rubber 
Plant Park. 

Skilled and expensive real-estate auc- 
tioneers are imported from California and 
New York — auctioneers capable of selling 
refrigerating machines to inhabitants of 
the Arctic Circle. People are lured to the 
auctions by free lunches, by distribution of 
souvenirs, by the giving away of automo- 
biles. 'We give away," advertises one sub- 



[46 SUN HUNTING 

division owner, *'a new Ford car each Mon- 
day or its equivalent in cash, and other 
valuable gifts daily for the duration of the 
sale. And we will entertain those who 
attend the sales with Any Amusements We 
Are Able To Provide." The exact meaning 
of the last phrase is shrouded in mystery, 
but it makes its appeal to those who read 
between the lines. 

"Remember," shouts another firm, "Re- 
member, We Are Giving Away Absolutely 
Gratis a Sedan to the Person Holding the 
Lucky Number — Get Your Free Ticket 
Now." "Auction! Auction! Auction!" 
bawls another. "Beautiful and useful sou- 
venirs and prizes to be given away." "Come 
ride in our busses and win our free prizes," 
coaxes another. 

Early in 1922 the real-estate firms which 
disposed of their land by auction were vocif- 
erating passionately that their auctions 
were bona fide, that they were "legitimate 
and sound," that they were "without re- 



TROPICAL GROWTH 147 

serve," that they were absolute. "Absolute 
auctions" was the watchword of the hour. 
The inference was, of course, that a num- 
ber of auction sales had been held that were 
not absolute. "One Thousand Dollars Re- 
ward," stated one firm in a dignified but 
bean-spilling manner, "will be paid for the 
proof of any buy-bidder at any of our sales. 
The opportunity of opportunities to buy a 
piece of the richest garden and fruit land in 
southern Florida. Remember, you make the 
price and every lot put up will positively 
be sold to the highest and best bidder with- 
out limit or reserve." 

This was what had been happening: 
Real-estate firms had advertised auctions, 
put up lots for sale, and, when those in at- 
tendance languidly refused to bid more than 
six or seven dollars for a lot, used profes- 
sional buyers to make phony bids in order 
either to run up the price or get the lots off 
the market. It is possible that such a thing 
will never happen again, now that real-estate 



148 SUN HUNTING 

firms have the habit of advertising absolute 
auctions — ^possible, but scarcely probable. 
With five or six auctions being held each 
day, and with large numbers of unattractive 
lots being offered to stolid middle-western- 
ers who have come more for the free lunch 
and the automobile ride than for the real- 
estate, it is inevitable that some lots will go 
for about one dollar and seventy-five cents 
if everything is left in the hands of the 
legitimate prospects. Common sense tells 
us that no real-estate dealer could stand 
such a blow without emitting raucous 
shrieks of pain, no matter how persuasively 
and convincingly he may chatter about 
absolute auctions. 

Some of the real-estate dealers allow cus- 
tomers to buy land on terms that would 
attract even Trotsky, who doesn't believe in 
that sort of thing. Four-hundred-dollar 
lots in one subdivision can be had for 
twenty dollars cash and ten dollars a month, 
with no interest or taxes for a year. In 



TROPICAL GROWTH 149 

another subdivision, one-thousand-two-hun- 
dred-and-fifty-dollar lots sell for one hun- 
dred dollars cash and twenty-five dollars a 
month until twenty per cent, of the principal 
has been paid, after which the buyer can 
sink back and refrain from paying any 
more on his principal for seven and a half 
years. A firm advertises island water-front 
lots at five thousand seven hundred and 
fifty dollars a lot, the terms being "seven 
hundred and fifty cash; balance five hun- 
dred every six months; no interest first 
year; no taxes till spring 1925." 



CHAPTER VI 

OF SUBDIVISIONS, WISE AND OTHERWISE OF LAND- 
SCAPE ATROCITIES OF SMALL FARMS AND FARM- 
ERS — AND OF FASCINATING STRAWBERRY 
AND TOMATO STATISTICS 

Subdivisions extend out of Miami in all 
'directions — up the coast and down the coast 
and inland and out into the bay in the shape 
of islands. Palm Beach is seventy- five miles 
north of Miami ; and there are almost enough 
subdivisions along that seventy-five mile 
stretch to provide homes for a million 
people. 

Some of the subdivisions are beautiful 
and some of them are horrible. Some have 
been thoroughly cleared of the tangled 
jungle of palmettos and other scrub that 
makes a total mess of all undeveloped Flor- 
ida land; and flawless roads and pavements 
have been constructed, water mains put in, 
and gas, water and electricity provided. 

150 



TROPICAL GROWTH 151 

Restrictions are imposed in some of the 
good ones: homes costing less than four 
thousand can not be built on certain lots, 
while on other lots they must cost at least 
fifteen thousand. 

Other subdivisions are laid out purely and 
simply, as the saying goes, for the purpose 
of separating the sucker from his money. 
The streets are half-laid, the location is 
vile, and the shacks that are run up on the 
crowded lots are little better than the marsh- 
huts of Revere Beach and Coney Island to 
which poverty-stricken city dwellers of 
Boston and New York frequently repaired 
during the heated terms of the early; 
'eighties. 

On top of these depressing spectacles, 
many of which may some day be partly 
obscured in tropical verdure, certain enter- 
prising citizens of Miami have added to 
Florida's scenic beauties by lining the road- 
sides with blatant sign-boards setting forth' 
the delights of garages, restaurants, cloth- 



152 SUN HUNTING 

ing emporia and similar enterprises. Not 
content with building self-sustaining sign- 
boards which protrude gauntly and repul- 
sively from the flat landscape and convince 
the newcomer that he is approaching a 
slum-city, they have nailed countless num- 
bers of huge yellow monstrosities to the 
palms and fruit-trees along the highways — 
signs that have no influence on any one 
except the lover of beauty, and which only 
serve to fill him with contempt for people 
who can permit the few natural beauties of 
their surroundings to be so befouled. In 
the North one expects to find — as he does 
find — a plague of sign-boards, and hideous 
summer resorts whose predominant fea- 
tures are those of the awful and tasteless 
'eighties. In the new South, however, which 
lures tourists with honeyed words and 
promises of every sort of beauty, the erect- 
ing of roadside sign-boards should be 
viewed with as much disgust and loathing 
as grapefruit-stealing or murder — both of 



TROPICAL GROWTH 153 

which crimes fall under somewhat the same 
head in Miami. 

Spreading through and beyond the sub- 
divisions are the orange and grapefruit 
groves, and the truck gardens and vegetable 
farms. Oranges and grapefruit are so 
common in southern Florida that grape- 
fruit are served free in many of the hotels ; 
while many other hotels keep large bowls of 
free oranges alongside the ice-water tank. 
So far as is known, these are the only things 
that one has a chance of getting for nothing 
in Florida hotels. 

There are hundreds of three-acre and 
five-acre farms owned by northerners who 
didn't like winter, and ran away from it 
with one or two thousand dollars in their 
pockets. Many of these little farmers not 
only manage to make both ends meet, but 
even salt away comfortable bank rolls. One 
little town near Miami shipped sixty-one 
thousand quarts of strawberries to northern 
cities during the first six weeks of the 1922 



154 SUN HUNTING 

season, and the growers' share of the spoils 
was fifty cents a quart. The wise straw- 
berry farmers, who plant their land to vel- 
vet beans during the summer and plow them 
under in September, and otherwise indulge 
in the clever tricks of the trade, get some 
very snappy results. One of the best straw- 
berry farmers near Miami had four and 
one-tenth acres of land planted to straw- 
berries in 192 1. His first berries came in 
on December twentieth, and he picked twice 
a week until July fifteenth. The total yield 
of his four and one-tenth acres was 41,059 
quarts, his average price for each quart was 
forty-five cents, and his gross sales 
amounted to slightly over eighteen thousand 
five hundred dollars. His total expenses 
were a little over six thousand dollars. 

More than eight thousand acres are 
planted to tomatoes in the vicinity of Miami, 
and nearly five hundred thousand crates 
were shipped north during the 1921 season. 
These tomatoes bring the growers about 



TROPICAL GROWTH 155 

three dollars a crate, of which about a dollar 
and seventy-five cents must be charged off 
to fertilizer, labor, hauling and crating. 
The life of a tomato farmer is not a happy 
one, for the crop is very sensitive to wet 
weather. It is also very sensitive to dry 
weather. The slightest nip of frost also 
puts a severe crimp in it. Some of the 
tomato farmers say that the plant is so sen- 
sitive that if a man cusses or chews tobacco 
in its vicinity, it will refuse to bear. In 
spite of all this, there are plenty of tomato- 
lovers to plant tomatoes every winter, and 
some of them have made fortunes out of this 
popular fruit — or vegetable. 



CHAPTER VII 

OF THE SUSPICIOUS STORIES CONCERNING THE 
MANGO — OF THE PET MANGO OF THE MIAMIANS 
^AND OF ITS SUPERIORITY TO OTHER THINGS 

The cupidity of farmers who are sick of 
northern winters is easily aroused by prices 
obtained for the best varieties of mangoes. 
'Their rich, spicy flavor, tempting fra- 
grance and beautiful coloring," say the 
Miami prospecti, "make them one of the 
most tempting table desserts that can be 
imagined." Miami, it appears, has a mo- 
nopoly on this fruit, and the catalogues rub 
in the bad news by adding that ''this 
monopoly is not only confined to the cultiva- 
tion, but also to the exquisite joy of eating it, 
as very few find their way to the northern 
markets, the local demand far exceeding 
the supply." One reads that the choicest 
varieties "readily sell in the northern mar- 

156 



TROPICAL GROWTH 157 

kets for from one dollar to one dollar and 
fifty cents each," thus confirming the skep- 
tical northerner in the belief of the late P. 
T. Barnum that there was one born every 
minute. The weak spot in this argument is 
not visible offhand to the doubting Thom- 
ases from the North who spend the winter 
in Florida. The mango ripens in summer — 
in June and July — so the winter visitors 
can not sink their teeth in the widely adver- 
tised fruit. Consequently they always feel 
sure that there is some good reason why the 
Florida people prefer the exquisite joy of 
eating the mango to the even more exquisite 
joy of shaking down their northern brothers 
for one dollar and fifty cents per mango. 
Strangely enough, there is no Ethiopian 
concealed anywhere in the mango woodpile, 
although any one who aspires to become a 
mango-grower may have his first fine en- 
thusiasm dashed by the fact that mango 
trees don't begin bearing until five to seven 
years after they have been set out ; and seven 



iS8 SUN HUNTING 

years is a long time to wait, especially if one 
is hunting for quick returns. 

The mango in its finest form, however, is 
worth waiting seven years for. The mango 
with which northerners are familiar is a 
small, mottled, unhealthy-looking fruit about 
the size of a large lemon. The interior is 
partly mushy and partly stringy, and it gets 
tangled up in the teeth in a most annoying 
manner. The general effect obtained from 
dallying with it is that the mango is a total 
loss. The pet mango of the Miamians is a 
very different proposition. It is known as 
the Hayden mango, and is about the size of 
a large coconut. When ripe it is rosy red 
all over, and has the fragrance of a flower. 
It is a baffling fruit to open, as its seed is 
about the size and shape of the cuttle-bone 
used as an aid to canaries' digestions. The 
unskilled mango eater will frequently wreck 
an entire mango trying to worry it open 
gently; but he eventually learns that one 



TROPICAL GROWTH 159 

must wring its neck in a brutal manner to 
get the best results. 

The meat of the Hayden mango is sweeter 
than that of any other fruit I know ; and it 
has a peculiar and delicious taste and aroma 
of pine forests. Years ago my grandfather, 
in the spring of the year, would go prowling 
through the New Hampshire woods ; and on 
his return he would bring with him a lard- 
pail full of the tender, slippery, fragrant 
inner lining of the bark of pine trees, locally 
known as "slyver.'* This was always seized 
with delighted acclaim by the entire family 
and wolfed down greedily because of its de- 
licious piney taste. The Hayden mango has 
the same piney taste raised to the thirty- 
third or master's degree. One Hayden 
mango makes an ample dessert for two 
people ; and I have not found that the Miam- 
ians are averse to selling them, or that the 
prices are as high as the catalogues claim. 
Packages of six Hayden mangoes have been 



i6o SUN HUNTING 

sent to me repeatedly from Miami by parcel 
post at three dollars a half dozen. 

The Miami catalogues are a trifle wild 
when they start raving about the exquisite 
joy of eating a mango that costs a dollar and 
a half; but if one can get a good Hayden 
mango for half a dollar, it will probably 
strike him as being considerably better than 
such ordinary matters as oatmeal gruel, 
baked beans, suet pudding, griddle cakes, 
fried bananas, bread pudding, or a poke in 
the eye with a pointed stick. 



CHAPTER VIII 

OF THE EVERGLADES AND OF THE TWO SEASONS 

OBTAINING IN THAT DAMP LOCALITY — AND 

OF GRASS^ FANCY AND OTHERWISE 

Off to the west of Miami lie the Ever- 
glades, first made famous by the Seminole 
War, when the United States Army spent 
upward of fifteen years trying to chase the 
Seminoles out of the Everglades but seldom 
saw more than three Seminoles at one time. 
The Everglades, not so long ago, was an 
enormous shallow lake eight thousand 
square miles in area, dotted with half-sub- 
merged islands out of which grew giant 
whiskered live oaks and countless varieties 
of tropical plants. The alligator basked in 
its shadowed streams; and the graceful 
panther lurked among the undergrowth, 
constantly ready to emit a bloodcurdling 
scream calculated to make the hardiest in- 
i6i 



i62 SUN HUNTING 

truder think longingly of home and mother. 
Exploration was made almost impossible by 
a saw-toothed grass which grew through- 
out the Everglades and extended several 
feet above the water, so that the person who 
tried to force his way through it would cut 
everything to shreds up to and including his 
eyebrows. People talked for years of drain- 
ing the Everglades ; but such talk was usually 
received with screams of laughter that ri- 
valed the yells of the Everglades panthers. 
Several years ago the State of Florida 
settled down in earnest to the systematic 
draining of the Everglades. Canals were 
cut, giant locks were installed to control the 
water level, and the land was cleared. 
Thousands of acres are being reclaimed each 
year, settlers are moving in constantly, and 
the reclaimed land is yielding vegetables and 
fruits of a size and quality to make a Maine 
farmer shake his head dubiously and won- 
der whether that last batch of licker that the 
sheriff sent him had affected his eyes. The 



TROPICAL GROWTH 163 

soil is a rich black muck which has resulted 
from centuries of decaying vegetation; and 
anything that will grow will grow about 
twice as large and twice as rapidly in the 
Everglades as it will anywhere else. There 
used to be only two seasons in the Ever- 
glades — wet and wetter ; but now there is a 
dry season; and in the course of a few 
years, when the fruit-trees begin to bear, the 
Everglades alone will be in a position to sup- 
ply every northern city throughout the win- 
ter with all the newfangled and oldfangled 
fruits and vegetables that can be desired. 

The thousands of farmers who have 
retired from active farming and are occupy- 
ing their winters by absorbing the sun in 
Miami and pitching horseshoes in Royal 
Palm Park become fearfully excited over 
the various varieties of grass that are raised 
in the Everglade lands. Grass is not a 
thing that one would expect to mention at 
any length in a casual dissertation on a win- 
ter resort; but the excessive wonderment 



i64 SUN HUNTING 

over it on the part of the horseshoe pitchers 
requires some mention of grass. It appears 
that some of the grasses that have come in 
thick enough to get themselves talked about 
are Para, Bermuda, Rhodes, Natal, Sudan, 
St. Lucia, St. Augustine, Napier, Broom, 
sage, Guatemalan, panicum, crab grass, 
maiden cane. Billion Dollar grass and several 
others. There seems to be everything but 
just plain grass. The chief idea of the farm- 
ers seems to be that with all this grass, the 
Florida stock raisers can have evergreen pas- 
turage, and cattle can be fed on about a third 
of the space that they need in the North. 

This, of course, is important if true; but 
the average person who comes to Miami is 
not interested in grass except as something 
on which to play golf or sit. What he wants 
is usually holiday relaxation and plenty of 
it; and if that's what he wants, he can get 
so much of it in and near Miami that one 
week of complete relaxation must usually 
be followed by two weeks of recuperation. 



CHAPTER IX 

OF THE OLD MIAMI AND THE NEW MIAMI OF DIF- 
FERENCES BETWEEN MIAMI BEACH AND PALM 
BEACH OF THE SCENIC POSSIBILITIES IN FLOAT- 
ING COCONUTS AND THE ACTIVITIES OF 
JOHN S. COLLINS 

The people who knew Miami prior to 19 18 
have in their minds an entirely different 
place from the Miami of to-day. The old 
Miami was a city first and a winter resort 
afterward. This statement will, of course, 
offend the touchy Miami folk; but it is true 
none the less. It was — and is — a hustling, 
bustling, booming, noisy city with about one 
automobile for each seven-eighths of an 
inhabitant, and with perpetual warmth and 
sunshine. In the long run, however, the big- 
money tourists don't want to go to a hust- 
ling, bustling, rapidly growing city for 
their winter holidays, even though the city 
may boast perpetual warmth and sunshine. 

165 



i66 SUN HUNTING 

What they want is clean air and plenty of 
sun and sky, and a complete change from 
the scenery to which they are accustomed 
in their northern cities, and a surcease from 
all noises except the noises they make them- 
selves — ^which are frequently much louder 
than the ordinary noises of a city. For that 
reason Palm Beach was in a class by itself. 
The big-money tourists went to Palm Beach. 
Miami got a smattering of them, but a very 
small smattering. Palm Beach sneered at 
Miami Beach and called it "the Coney 
Island of Florida."' 

That, however, was prior to 191 8. To- 
day Miami has been augmented by Miami 
Beach; and eventually Miami Beach will 
nose out ahead of Palm Beach and get all 
the youngsters and live wires who like to be 
on the jump from eight in the morning until 
three and four and five o'clock the next 
morning — with occasional busy evenings 
which will keep them up until six or seven 
in the morning. Palm Beach folk still sneer 




Any January morning at Miami Beach. 




A January afternoon tea-dance on the shore of Biscayne Bay. 



TROPICAL GROWTH 167 

at Miami Beach and still, according to their 
ancient custom, call it the Coney Island 
of Florida. But it isn't the Coney Island of 
Florida; and Palm Beach is frightened for 
the first time in years — frightened that the 
wealthy tourists will desert the endless cor- 
ridors of her hotels and the continuous 
clothes-changing and the eternal chatter and 
twaddle of society and near-society and the 
lifeless air of Bradley's Roulette Emporium, 
and get down to Miami, where there's 
something doing every minute, and where 
people go into dinner in golf clothes without 
getting a hard look from the head waiter. 

The story of Miami Beach is a remark- 
able one and without it Miami would scarcely 
be able to get out gaudy prospectuses with 
pictures of beautifully shaped ladies in red 
one-piece bathing suits on the covers. This 
is the way of it: 

Miami's palm-shaded streets run down to 
the shores of Biscayne Bay, which is a 
strip of water some seven miles long and 



i68 SUN HUNTING 

between two and three miles wide. Between 
the bay and the ocean is a long narrow 
tongue of land, not much over a mile in 
width at its widest point. Prior to 1913, 
ninety-nine per cent, of this narrow tongue 
of land was a worthless jungle. The man 
who owned it is said to have bought it for 
twelve thousand dollars. The only way of 
reaching it was by ferry boat, and there was 
nothing on it in the line of a winter resort 
except a bathing shack on the beach at the 
extreme tip, to which a few tourists occasion- 
ally repaired when the urge for sea bathing 
became almost too intense to be endured. 

A persistent attempt had been made to 
utilize the natural advantages of this narrow 
tongue of sand and jungle. In 1884 some 
New Jersey business men essayed to plant 
coconuts on it in sufficient quantities to 
make the venture profitable. There were 
no railroads, and it could only be reached by 
boat. Three shiploads of coconuts were 
brought from the island of Trinidad. The 



TROPICAL GROWTH 169 

ships were anchored off the tongue of land; 
and when the wind blew toward the shore, 
the coconuts were dumped overboard to float 
to land. Three hundred and thirty-four 
thousand coconuts were sent ashore by the 
promoters of this scheme. They cost five 
cents apiece in Trinidad, and the freight 
figured up to six cents apiece. The venture 
became so costly that the promoters hunted 
around for more capital and succeeded in in- 
teresting a New Jersey fruit-grower named 
John S. Collins. As a commercial proposi- 
tion, the coconut planting was a complete 
failure. But as a flyer in landscape archi- 
tecture, it was a great success; for the en- 
tire ocean-front of the tongue of land was 
fringed with beautiful coconut palms. 

The original coconut planters dropped out 
as their failure became apparent. Collins 
and one other man hung on to their narrow 
and apparently worthless piece of land. In 
the center of it was some high ground on 
which Collins conceived the idea of starting 



I70 SUN HUNTING 

a grove of avocados, better known as alli- 
gator pears. The avocado shuns frost as an 
Epworth Leaguer shuns cocktails ; and since 
there is no frost worthy of the name on the 
tongue of land because of its water-protec- 
tion on both sides, Collins figured that 
avocado culture could be made to pay. He 
was right; and his avocado grove is now 
the largest in the world. The speed with 
which he worked, however, didn't meet the 
approval of his one remaining partner; so 
ColHns bought him out, becoming the sole 
owner of the narrow sand-spit with the 
avocado grove down its backbone. 

It then began to dawn on Collins, who was 
seventy- four years old and therefore able to 
see a good many things that younger men 
overlooked, that his sand-spit was a pleasant 
place on which to live during the winter and 
summer too, but that he probably couldn't 
persuade people to live there until he made 
it possible for people to get there. Conse- 
quently he conceived the idea of building a 



TROPICAL GROWTH 171 

wooden bridge two and one-half miles in 
length — the longest vehicle bridge in the 
world — between Miami and the sand-spit. 

The bridge was started in July, 191 2; and, 
as has always been customary in the early de- 
velopments of Florida, his friends, attorneys 
and bankers almost had heart-failure over 
his wild scheme. They prophesied enthusias- 
tically that in about two years' time he would 
be standing at the Miami end of his unfin- 
ished bridge, begging for nickels with which 
to get a square meal. The population of 
Miami at that time was about seven thou- 
sand five hundred. 

At one time, late in 19 12, the amateur 
prophets were looking gloomily at Collins 
and saying proudly to each other : 'Well, I 
told him so!'' The bridge was such a tre- 
mendous undertaking that the Collins money 
began to pinch out; and no local talent could 
be found to advance any sum larger than 
nine dollars on the chance of making a suc- 
cess out of the bridge or the sand-spit. 



CHAPTER X 

OF THE ARRIVAL OF CARL FISHER IN MIAMI — OF 

fisher's FEVERISH IMAGINATION AND VIOLENT 

DREAMS — OF THE DESPAIR OF FISHEr's FRIENDS 

— ^AND OF THE EVOLUTION OF A JUNGLE 

Early in 19 13 a wealthy Indianapolis 
business man named Carl G. Fisher came to 
Miami for his health. Fisher, from the 
days v^hen he used to be a news butcher on 
Indiana trains, was able to see the possibili- 
ties in things which every one else regarded 
as impossibilities. He had always plunged 
heavily on his beliefs while his friends and 
acquaintances stood on the side-lines and 
told one another what a shame it was that 
Carl had gone bugs. One of his plunges had 
been the big Indianapolis Speedway — a gi- 
gantic structure which does all its business, 
pays its expenses and makes its profits on 
one day out of the year. 

Collins, unable to complete his bridge 
172 



TROPICAL GROWTH 173 

alone, went to Fisher and asked him for as- 
sistance. Fisher, with his ever-present will- 
ingness to take a chance, supplied Collins 
with the necessary funds to finish the job, 
taking in return a large and unprepossessing 
slice of the long, narrow, jungle-grown sand- 
spit that shut Miami off from the sea. He 
immediately began to take a passionate in- 
terest in that desolate piece of real estate. In 
his feverish mind's eye he saw it covered 
with the greatest winter resort of modern 
times — with acres of beautiful homes, and 
hotels bowered in towering palms and scar- 
let-flowered hibiscus; with polo fields and 
golf links and tennis courts and ice-rinks: 
with lagoons and canals and artificial islands 
and Venetian gondolas: with casinos and 
bath-houses and outdoor swimming pools 
that would outdo anything in America or 
Europe. 

He let himself go with the utmost en- 
thusiasm, and kept his imagination working 
on a twenty-two-hour day. His friends 



174 SUN HUNTING 

gave up all hope for him. "Poor Fisher!" 
they murmured privately behind his back. 
'Toor Fisher has gone completely loco. We 
must make arrangements to put him away 
quietly." 

After he had dreamed a few of his more 
violent dreams, he went out to the sand-spit 
to look it over more carefully and decide 
definitely where to put a few of the hotels 
and casinos. Around its shores he found 
a solid wall of mangroves whose interlaced 
roots rose several feet out of the water in 
such a confused and slimy jumble that any 
appreciable progress through them was a 
matter of hours. So he got a gang of 
twelve negroes and set them to work hack- 
ing a hole all the way through this jungle. 
Beyond the mangrove swamp was a solidly 
interlaced growth of cabbage palms and 
palmettos through which no human being 
could force a passage without tearing his 
clothes and his skin to shreds. The palm 
and palmetto growth filled every part of 



TROPICAL GROWTH 175 

his property except the shores — and the 
shores were overgrown with mangroves. 

Greatly cheered and stimulated by these 
obstacles, he promptly set to work on his 
scheme to build, almost overnight, Ameri- 
ca's greatest winter resort. Starting at the 
extreme tip of the tongue, his gangs of 
laborers cleared off the mangroves, cabbage 
palms, palmettos and other scrub. They 
found bear in it, and panther and countless 
numbers of smaller animals, and quail by 
the thousands. Then along the edges of the 
tongue they built high cement bulkheads. 
As the bulkheads were finished, dredgers 
pumped sand and water out of Biscayne Bay 
and inside the bulkheads. The water ran 
off, but the sand remained and turned the 
swamps and marshes into solid land. This 
work required dredging crews of one hun- 
dred and fifty men, three pumping boats, 
two digging boats, from ten to fifteen 
barges, five supply boats, two oil tugs, two 
anchor boats and an eighteen-inch pipe line 



176 SUN HUNTING 

over a mile in length. For eight months the 
pay roll was four thousand dollars a day, 
and Fisher's friends daily became more in- 
sistent that he be locked up where he could 
no longer throw his money into the Atlantic 
Ocean. 

Canals and inland waterways were dug 
so that future residents might have easy 
access to all portions of the resort by yacht, 
house-boat and motor-boat. Palms, hibiscus 
and tropical plants and vines slowly crept 
along in the rear of the dredging operations. 
Fifty acres were turned into polo fields. 
Three hundred and twenty-five acres were 
set aside for golf courses. Three excellent 
golf courses were made, two at a cost of 
two hundred thousand dollars apiece, and 
one at a cost of a quarter million. 

To-day, the tongue of land that was an 
impenetrable jungle in 19 13 and a waste of 
sand in 19 17, has become the city of Miami 
Beach. Its value has grown from twelve 
thousand to twenty million. There may be 



TROPICAL GROWTH 177 

some to question the latter figure; but the 
accessed value of Miami Beach property in 
1921 was $5,540,112; and unimproved 
property was being assessed at one-quarter 
of its valuation, while improved property 
was being assessed at one-tenth of its valua- 
tion. It has a frontage of six miles on the 
ocean, seven miles on Biscayne Bay, and 
sixteen miles on inland waterways and 
canals — though a Miami Beach enthusiast 
would no more think of listing Miami Beach 
property in miles than a jeweler would think 
of listing diamonds in quarts. It is too prec- 
ious. He lists it in feet, and tells you that 
the frontage on inland waterways is eighty- 
five thousand feet. In a few years, if he 
progresses in the future as he has in the 
past, he'll probably be listing it in inches. 



CHAPTER Xr 

OF EXPENSIVE EXPENSES AND HEATED ICE-RINKS — 

OF LILY ON LILY THAT o'eRPLACE THE SEA 

AND OF THE BONEHEADEDNESS OF MOST OF 
THE HUMAN RACE 

In 19 1 3 Miami Beach was an impene- 
trable jungle on a sand-spit and a swamp. 
In 1922 many a water-front lot was being 
sold for double the price that was paid for 
the original jungle not so many years ago. 

In place of the sand and the swamp and 
the jungle there are over forty miles of 
street and roads, lined with palms and 
shrubs. Several hotels have been built, the 
largest of which — the Flamingo — looks ex- 
actly like a grain elevator and has the reputa- 
tion of being the most expensive winter 
resort hotel in the world. As a matter of 
fact, it is no more expensive than the big 
Palm Beach hotels — although that is suffi- 
ciently expensive to send the cold shivers 

178 



TROPICAL GROWTH 179 

up and down the spine of the person who 
hasn't become thoroughly hardened to 
money-spending. Two people can have a 
nice room with bath and all the food they 
want — in reason — for forty dollars a day. 
They can also have free oranges, which 
somehow seems to remove some of the 
numbing pain from the impact of the bill 
against the brain. There is no particular 
reason why it should, as one can easily 
drown himself in the juice from a dollar's 
worth of oranges. 

There are a score and more of apart- 
ment-houses, and three hundred and fifty 
private residences ranging from uncon- 
sciously simple little ten-thousand-dollar 
bungalows up to artfully simple little two- 
hundred-thousand-dollar cottages. 

Within another six years, according to 
the more sane and conservative Miami 
Beach predicters, there will be six or seven 
more hotels at Miami Beach, all larger than 
the Flamingo. Fisher has another modest 



i8o SUN HUNTING 

caravansary planned which is to have an ice- 
rink, covered tennis courts and a tanbark 
horse-show enclosure on the roof. Unless 
his friends lock him up, he is sure to carry 
out his plans — ^which will probably be as 
highly successful as his past ventures. 

A few of his friends no longer fear for 
his sanity. His former business partner in 
Indianapolis, James A. Allison, has even 
helped the good work along by building and 
stocking at Miami Beach an aquarium that 
rivals the great aquariums of Monaco, 
Naples, Honolulu and Manila. A great 
many of his friends, however, still shake 
their heads pityingly when they hear men- 
tion of hotels with ice-rinks on the roof. 

The dredging operations which had trans- 
ferred sand from the bottom of Biscayne 
Bay to the top of Miami Beach had left sev- 
eral unsightly mud banks protruding a few 
inches from the surface of the bay. Fisher 
surrounded these mud banks with bulk- 
heads and pumped more mud into them. 



TROPICAL GROWTH i8i 

The result was seven beautiful islands, most 
of which are already shaded by palm groves 
and dotted with simple but beautiful homes 
costing about thirty dollars a square inch. 
They are easy of access, since they are con- 
nected with the mainland or the causeway. 
Some Miami people have likened these 
islands to lilies which o'erlace the sea, after 
the fashion of Senator Lodge quoting from 
Browning in an attempt to explain the 
islands of the Pacific to a concourse of 
hard-boiled hearers; but Palm Beach folk, 
with that peculiar jealousy evinced by the 
residents of one Florida resort toward 
everything in a rival Florida resort, say that 
they look more like floating flapjacks. The 
truth, of course, lies between ; and when they 
are covered with masses of tropical foliage, 
there will be nothing f lapjackish about them. 
One of the islands, together with an obelisk 
rising from its center, was constructed as 
a memorial to Henry M. Flagler, without 
whose vision and foresight Florida would 



i82 SUN HUNTING 

probably only be known as the place that 
Florida Water was named after. One of 
the largest islands has an area of sixty 
acres. A mile of bulkhead, with bulkhead- 
ing at twelve dollars a foot, was necessary 
in its construction, and its total cost was 
half a million dollars. 

The inability of ninety per cent, of the 
human race to see how a thing is going to 
look when finished has cost the human race 
a large amount of money at Miami Beach. 
Not long ago, for example, an effort was 
made to sell a new house for sixteen thou- 
sand dollars. It stood on new flat land, 
however, and there were no trees or shrubs 
around it. Everybody who saw it refused 
to buy It; so three thousand five hundred 
dollars was spent in planting grass, palms 
and flowers and adding walks and a boat- 
house. When this had been done, the house 
sold instantly for thirty thousand dollars 
to one of the men who had refused to pay 
sixteen thousand for it the preceding year. 



CHAPTER XII 

OF ONE-PIECE AND TWO-FIFTHS-PIECE BATHING SUITS 

OF THE HONORABLE WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN 

AND HIS ACTIVITIES — OF BOOTLEGGERS OF THE 

SANCTIMONIOUS HAIG AND HAIG BOYS — AND 
OF RUM IN GENERAL 

Miami and Miami Beach are now con- 
nected by a curving concrete causeway 
three and a half miles long. New and 
spacious as it is, it is often too small to 
accommodate the thousands of automobiles 
that hasten out to Miami Beach on hot 
Sunday afternoons in mid-winter in order 
that their occupants may obtain an eyeful, 
as the saying goes, of the bathing crowds. 
iThe prudish element hasn't yet been able to 
make its influence felt at Miami Beach to 
any noticeable extent. The one-piece bath- 
ing suit is heavily displayed by engaging 
young women, and there are also large num- 
bers of bathing suits which appear to be 

183 



i84 SUN HUNTING 

one-half-piece or even two-fifths-piece. 
The latter variety of bathing suit is never 
worn with stockings; for no stockings — so 
far as is known — ^have yet been made long 
enough to reach to the hips. A striking 
effect is frequently obtained by the wearers 
of these two-fifths-piece bathing suits 
when they stroll out on the beach in short, 
hip-length capes which hang open negli- 
gently at the throat. One sees nothing 
below the cape but several square yards of 
flesh, and nothing above the cape but several 
square feet of flesh. It is a sight that gives 
one pause. When one sees it for the first 
time, he feels that he ought to hunt up a 
life-saver sometime later in the day and ask 
him to go and speak to the young woman and 
tell her that she has come out without her 
two-fifths-piece bathing suit. But one soon 
becomes accustomed to seeing such things — 
so accustomed, in fact, that one feels disap- 
pointed if he doesn't see them. 

The Honorable William Jennings Bryan 





The site of the Flamingo Hotel, Miami Beach (at top) in 1912; 
(in middle) in 1917; and (at bottom) in 1922. 




I 

cr 
< 

PQ 



TROPICAL GROWTH 185 

has a home in Miami, and was devoting 
most of his time during the winter of 1922 
to assuring his large and enthusiastic au- 
diences that the doctrine of evolution, 
hitherto accepted as proved by every 
reputable scientist because of the over- 
whelming mass of supporting evidence, is 
no more worthy of credence than the story 
of Cinderella and the little Glass Slipper; 
that, in fact, it is as harmful to the young 
and impressionable as an unexpurgated 
set of Burton's Arabian Nights. The 
citizens of Miami Beach were highly de- 
lighted with Mr. Bryan's anti-evolution 
activities — not because they have anything 
against evolution, but because they like to 
see Mr. Bryan interested in something that 
will keep him from trying to make his neigh- 
bors conform to his ideas of right, and, by 
so doing, spoiling the bathing-hour. In 
fact, a committee of Miami Beachers was 
thinking of waiting on Mr. Bryan when he 
had finished shooting holes in Darwin, Hux- 



i86 SUN HUNTING 

ley, Wallace, Herbert Spencer and other dis- 
tinguished scientists, and urging him to at- 
tack the disgusting and contemptible theory 
that the earth is a globe or sphere, and to 
come out strong for a flat earth. 

There are no wheel-chairs in Miami 
Beach, as there are in Palm Beach. The 
hotels tried to interest their guests in wheel- 
chairs, but the guests would have none of 
them. They are successful at Palm Beach 
because the Palm Beachers find them useful 
things in which to kill time. But at Miami 
Beach one has no time for time-killing. 
There is something doing every minute. 
There is golf and tennis and polo and bath- 
ing and dancing and seeing the bootlegger, 
or rushing over to town to see a movie or 
an orange grove or another bootlegger or 
something, and if one tried to get around in 
a wheel-chair, he'd come down with nervous 
prostration in a couple of days. 

The bootleggers are very active in Miami ; 
and the Miami bootlegger is a very superior 



TROPICAL GROWTH 187 

sort of bootlegger. He comes around to his 
patrons each day with long lists of wet 
goods and the prices, and gives the names of 
prominent bankers as references for his re- 
liability. The prices seem pleasingly low to 
northerners who have been paying one hun- 
dred and twenty dollars a case for stuff that 
is only fit for cleaning the nicotine out of 
pipe stems. The bootleggers get their wares 
in Bimini, which is a small island only a few 
miles off the Florida coast. It is a British 
island, but the British officials evidently 
haven't any idea of assisting the United 
States to enforce her laws. One of the 
leading Scotch distillers stated contempt- 
uously when I was in Scotland a little over a 
year ago that it would allow none of its pro- 
duct to be sold to a nation of hypocrites — 
meaning America. A good percentage of 
the stuff in Bimini, however, is Haig & 
Haig, and it was the Haig & Haig people 
that made the pleasant observation about the 
nation of hypocrites. 



i88 SUN HUNTING 

The past record of all distillers has proved 
conclusively that they would sell to anybody 
that had the price — ^hypocrite, murderer, 
wife-beater, degenerate or sot; and Haig & 
Haig are no better than the rest of them. 

All this Haig & Haig comes over to Flor- 
ida, where it is not esteemed very highly 
because it was apparently turned out of the 
distillery in a hurry for the American trade. 
The Miami bootleggers recommend Lawson 
Scotch to their friends rather than Haig & 
Haig, for they say that the Haig & Haig is 
too green — whatever that means. The uni- 
versal bootlegging price for Scotch whisky 
in Miami is fifty dollars a case.* The boot- 
leggers buy it for twenty- four dollars a case 
in Bimini. The taxicab men at the big 
hotels retail the stuff to the hotel guests at 
ten dollars a bottle or one hundred and 
twenty dollars a case, which makes a very 
nice profit for them. Gin can be bought — 
from the bootleggers, not from the taxicab 



♦February, 1922, quotations. 



TROPICAL GROWTH 189 

agents — for thirty dollars and forty dollars 
a case; while the most expensive liquid re- 
freshment is absinthe, which comes as high 
as sixty-five dollars a case. 

Tourists who plan to bring back a wee 
nip of Scotch with them from Florida should 
be very careful to carry the bottles in their 
hand luggage. Many trunks are opened on 
the way up, evidently by members of the train 
crews, and all alcoholic stimulants carefully 
abstracted. Nothing else is touched. A 
friend of mine took three metal hot-water 
bottles to Florida with him so that he could 
bring Scotch back in them. These bottles 
were encased in pretty pink flannel wrap- 
pers. He filled them with Scotch as 
planned; but when he reached Washington 
again, he found that his trunk had been 
opened and the bottles removed. The pink 
flannel wrappers were left behind, and 
nothing else had been touched. 

There seems to be an idea in the North 
that rum-running from Bimini and Cuba to 



iQO SUN HUNTING 

the Florida coast can be easily stopped by 
Prohibition agents. This is a mistaken 
idea; for the rum-runner has several hun- 
dred miles of uninhabited coastline and 
keys on which to land his cargo. It was 
among these keys that the most notorious 
pirates of the early days concealed their 
vessels and their treasure, and eluded pur- 
suit for years. It would be as easy to catch 
a rum-runner among the Florida keys as to 
locate a red ant in the Hippodrome. 

Any Prohibition enforcement agent that 
didn't have lead in his shoes and a daub of 
mud in both eyes, however, could easily get 
the goods on twenty or thirty Miami boot- 
leggers in a day. 

One good result of comparatively cheap 
whisky in Miami is the apparently total dis- 
appearance of beer-making and other home- 
brewing activities. There seems to be no mar- 
ket for hops, malt, prunes, raisins or wash- 
boilers — ^which would seem to make Miami 
an unusually healthy city in which to live. 



CHAPTER XIII 

OF FLORIDA FISHING — OF THE TIGERISH BARRACUDA 

AND THE SURPRISED-LOOKING DOLPIN OF THE 

UNCONVENTIONAL HABITS OF THE WHIP-RAY 
AND THE VARYING ESTIMATES OF CAP'n CHAR- 
LEY THOMPSON — AND OF THE CONSERVA- 
TIVE RAVING OF THE MIAMI PROSPECTUSES 

The Florida keys drip down from the end 
of the peninsula on which Miami beach is 
built, and would doubtless be compared by 
Senator Lodge or the late Robert Browning 
to a necklace of jade and gold, or to mango 
on mango that o'erlace the sea, or something 
similarly poetic. Among, between and 
around these keys is found the greatest 
fishing in the world. Florida fishing is 
about as much like the ordinary conception 
of fishing as prize-fighting is like fox-trot- 
ting. Instead of sitting contemplatively over 
a rod and reel with a pipe in his mouth and 
a dreamy look in his eyes, and occasionally 
snaking a small fish out of the water in a 
191 



192 SUN HUNTING 

leisurely manner, the Florida fisherman 
crouches over his rod with taut muscles and 
enters knock-down and drag-out fights 
with bundles of concentrated energy that 
leave him as sore and limp and blistered as 
though he had been wrestling with the 
Twentieth Century Limited. 

Speedy motor-boats slip away from 
Miami landing-stages and reach the fishing 
grounds in an hour. Over the reefs, on 
whose rocky peaks lie the skeletons of many 
an ancient wreck, wait the barracuda, some- 
times known as the tigers of the sea. They 
are long, slim, silvery fish, rather like enor- 
mous pickerel, and their jaws are set with 
heavy dog-teeth. They average between 
four and five feet in length; and as the 
fisherman sits in the stern of a motor-boat 
with his bait spinning along thirty yards 
astern, he can see the barracuda following, 
following along behind the bait like a thin 
gray shadow. The barracuda is always 
there and always hungry; so when all other 



TROPICAL GROWTH 193 

game fish fail, the fishermen turn to him. 
When he finally decides to take the bait, he 
takes it with such vigor that the fisherman 
feels that a steamer trunk has fallen on the 
tip of his rod. The rods are stiff as iron 
and the big reels have drags on them that 
would stop a race-horse in a hundred yards; 
so the average barracuda seldom fights 
more than ten minutes. All game fish, of 
course, are caught by trolling from the back 
of a motor-boat traveling from six to ten 
miles an hour. 

Out a little farther toward the gulf 
stream are the golden dolphins, thin and 
surprised-looking fish, much smaller than 
the barracuda, but better fighters. There, 
too, is the husky amber jack, that fights for 
twenty minutes and more in spite of the 
heavy drag on the reel. The prettiest wel- 
ter-weight fighter of the Florida waters is 
the sail fish, a blue and silver torpedo, five 
and six and seven feet in length, with a 
spear for a nose and a lateen sail for a dor- 



194 SUN HUNTING 

sal fin. He is a finicky striker; and when 
he IS at the bait one feels only a slight jar. 
The lightness of the touch usually means 
sailfish; and when it comes, the fisherman 
releases his drag and lets his line run out 
fifteen or twenty or even thirty feet. Then 
he snaps the drag back into place and hoists 
his rod with a mighty heave without further 
inquiry. Frequently the sailfish is at the 
end of the line, in which case the fun begins 
' — the sensation being about the same as 
holding a bucking bronco at the end of a 
fifty-yard rope. If an amateur is holding 
the rod, the end of the thirty or forty-five 
minute fight finds him calling in a weak and 
trembling voice for a large drink of varnish 
or some similar restorative, and he spends 
the remainder of the trip pricking and 
caressing the blisters on his hands. 

Farther out in the gulf stream are the 
kings of the heavy-weight scrappers — tuna; 
while between the keys and the mainland 
are the giant tarpon. These fish will fight 



TROPICAL GROWTH 195 

for two, three and even four hours ; and if, 
in their leapings to shake the hooks from 
their mouths they chance to fall in the boat, 
there is never any room for any one else. 

The spectacles that one sees in these Flor- 
ida waters are enough to make Izaak Walton 
take the pledge. 

During one day's fishing which I had off 
the keys with President James Allison of 
the Miami Aquarium and Cap'n Charley 
Thompson, champion tarpon-tracker of Bis- 
cayne Bay, a whip-ray twenty feet from 
wing to wing shot thirty feet into the air 
just ahead of our boat, falling back into the 
water with a crash that must have been 
heard a mile in every direction. Cap'n 
Thompson declared that this violent leaping 
was due to the fact that the whip-ray fre- 
quently feeds on clams. When he has 
gathered a bushel of clams into his stomach, 
he leaps high in the air and descends on his 
stomach. The resultant crash breaks all the 
clamshells and permits the ray to digest the 



196 SUN HUNTING 

clams. This doesn't sound exactly right, 
but one should be careful about disbelieving 
any of these Florida stories. A little later 
a giant marlin or spear fish plunged out of 
the water among our three lines when each 
line had a dolphin fighting busily at its end. 
Cap'n Thompson estimated his weight at 
four hundred pounds, but three hours later 
he was estimating it at seven hundred 
pounds. At the end of the afternoon, when 
the lines were being reeled in preparatory 
to starting home, an eight-foot shark 
surged up from nowhere and removed my 
bait from beneath my hand. Fortunately, 
he removed the hook with it, and a few 
minutes later he was lashed fast to the stern 
of the boat, making a hurried trip back to 
Miami — where Director Louis Mowbray of 
the Aquarium spent a happy hour removing 
pilot fish and parasites from his nose and 
gills and tongue. 

One can never tell what is going to turn 
up in Florida waters. The prospectuses of 



TROPICAL GROWTH 197 

both winter and summer resorts usually lay 
it on a little too thick. The Miami pros- 
pectuses always sound very much too much. 
Starting with the bathing-girls on the front 
cover and ending with the proud fisherman 
on the back cover, they always look a little 
too perfect. The phrasing, too, seems a 
trifle sappy and fat-headed. *'It's June in 
Miami," these prospectuses declare, "where 
winter is turned to summer.'' They seem 
to rave over-wildly. "Miami welcomes you 
with the smile of the tropics,'' rave these bits 
of passionate literature, "and the warmth of 
the unclouded sun is instilled in the hos- 
pitality of the greeting that awaits you 
here. Leave winter behind, fling care to 
the icy winds, come to Miami and play at be- 
ing eternally young again. Here in Nature's 
most alluring out-of-doors playground, un- 
der azure skies, amid fronded palms and 
riotous flowers, with song of bird, balmy air, 
and the benediction of glorious sunshine, find 
health, happiness and contentment." 



198 SUN HUNTING 

It seems like raving before youVe been 
there. But after you've been there you 
recognize that the bathing girls and the fish 
are as advertised. As for the prospectuses, 
they don't seem so violent after all. In fact, 
they seem pretty conservative. 

THE END 



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